this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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It's hard to really describe to younger generations just what it was like.
I'm an elder millennial (1984) and the changes to games within my lifetime has been breath taking and staggering.
The first game I remember playing is River Raid on my brother's Atari. I was a vaguely plane shaped black block.
A couple years later, I find myself playing Super Mario Bros. A few more and it's SMB3 and I'm holding a gameboy in my hands on the road trips to Florida to see my grandparents.
Then the jump to SNES and Genesis. Seeing that depth and life seep into the characters... The music gaining in complexity...
I even had a Sega CD and I remember how mind blowing it was when Sonic turned and ran towards the back to go through a loop instead of just side to side.
Then for it was PS1 with Final Fantasy 7... Graphical cut scenes like moving works of art.
After this point, yes there was still obvious and sometimes bigger jumps... But this is where it all was SO different each generation. Not just seeing extra small details and polishes. Large, discrete jumps forward
I wish I could give my wonder to anyone who never got to experience it. It was an amazing time to live.
I laugh every time I see the words "literally unplayable" because of minor headache
Started with Atari 2600, now VR simrig racing.
I have friends my age who won't play games in anything below 1440p, 120Hz and I'm like... You are denying yourself a whole world of awesome games and experiences...
Its a truly unique experience that only WE experienced. Anyone much older, wasn't interested in video games, and anyone much younger, was gaming in realistic 3D before they could understand what was even happening.
I feel it's similar to the person in the early 1900s who had a horse & cart as a kid and experienced the invention of cars, highways, planes and eventually space travel.
My biggest "wow" effect was Gran Turismo (1). The moving reflections on the cars!
～(つˆ0ˆ)つ｡☆
I legit thought that was a pre-rendered video until I saw them crash in the same place I did.
And yet in most of my games for Switch they can't even do half-assed mirror reflections :(
N64 was doing that years earlier with Top Gear Rally
The closest I've felt to those monumental leaps in recent history was the first time I played VR. It feels similarly mind-blowing.
VR is great, but it's just so hard to convince people with a trailer, it really is something that you have to experience, I'm glad there was a VR arcade here for me to try it out.
It's just a shame that only one company wants to bring it to the masses, and they're one of the worst companies I can think of.
Although the last few years have certainly given them competition on that front, if not the VR one.
I'm still mad that Microsoft is deciding to just brick WMR devices. It's such a scum move. They should require unlocking and open-sourcing the firmware at that point.
"But muh companee seecrets :(" Clearly you're done with them, M$ / HP / Samsung / Asus and friends!
I'm happy Monado is a thing but right now it just feels like a very big "if" for these devices, and I refuse to give facebook any money for any reason.
At least there's hope with possibly lightly used Vive kits or something? Idk...
Meta will brick my headset unless I tell them my birthday within 30 days, and just by using the device it links to multiple emails, my phone number, phone, and laptops. The OS feels cooked to grab data and many of the TOS agreements say it explicitly.
https://www.meta.com/help/quest/articles/accounts/account-settings-and-management/why-we-ask-for-your-birthday/
But at the same time it's under £300 and doesn't even need a PC or PS5 to run it.
A PSVR2 with console will set you back just under £1000. A Valve Index setup with good PC is probably going to be close to £2500.
It's not hard to see why the Quest outsells all the others by miles.
You either pay with money or your data. This clearly shows the value of your data.
Very true. I'm definitely softer on Zuckerberg and his company after owning a couple oculus headsets, my misery is less, I live another day. It feels like doing something I know I shouldn't do but I can't help but enjoy it.
What? I assume you're referencing Meta, but Valve cooked their own VR solution years and years ago (Valve Index) and it's pretty much the best one out there, and the software gets an update about once a week.
Yes, but it's not really for the masses is it? It costs over a grand which is a big ask for hardware that few people actually make games for.
The PS5 is $750 and only plays PS4 games and people are still buying those
I remember walking into Blockbuster one day, and they had a playable Super Mario 64. I was blown away by a game where you could move in 3D with graphics like that.
I think the next couple jumps were very good too.
Ps1 was just polygons, you could see all the edges and the games were not complex.
Then ps2 happened, now you get games like gta 3 and gran turismo. San Andreas was one of the longest and most in depth games in terms of all the mini games inside.
After that, came imo the peak of game graphics. Sure, some today might be technically better, but at the time, Crysis on very good hardware looked almost indistinguishable from reality. I remember seeing some highly detailed renders of people’s faces and thinking how it was just like real life.
After Crysis, there wasn’t really any other “big jump” unless you count the hard drive space requirements.
Having said that, bf3 and red dead 2 felt like milestones.
PS2 was definitely a huge jump to me, too
The biggest detail for me being that characters blinked outside of cut scenes in higher resolution (for the time) games like The Bouncer.
It stopped feeling like leaps after that. And even that, for me, felt more like polish.
But I love the discussion and I like seeing where and how people draw the lines!
As a millennial born a few years before you, I don't really appreciate the "elder" wording you used there. I'd threaten violence, but I hurt my knee walking the other day and I don't think that'd be good for either of us.
My first videogame machine was for black and white TVs and had 10 games, and all of them bar the target shooting game were variants of Pong.
PS2 was the last really big graphical leap. My fucking mind was blown by GTA3.
Since then we've had higher resolution, normal maps, physically based rendering and now raytracing, but none of it really feels that huge when moving from one gen to the next. PS2 came out and everything from before was obsolete, instantly. It even had backwards compatibility but I think I used it exactly once just to see the texture "improvements" (they actually just blurred them). This gen I've used it all the time.
For me it was call of duty 3. Right before one of the most epic runs of a series of all time. But the graphics blew me away. Some of the in-game graphics looked just like old war videos. It was crazy how real everything felt.
I started out on a Commodore 64. I remember when I encountered my first 3d accelerated game, I think it was Microsoft Motocross Madness, at a friend's house, IIRC he had a 400mhz pentium with a Matrox card, I want to say G400, but who knows, it was so long ago.... Anyway 3D games were common, but not with accelerated graphics... It was mind-blowing.
I'm a bit older than you but I feel that games have stagnated. It's the same games over and over again with some exceptions.
This is a larger problem in our society at large: the financial class basically strangling creativity in search of ever increasing secure profit.
It sucks because the talent is all there to make these games and be creative but big money doesn't want to take a chance.
So they shit out games that just reprise other things, remake old games, etc. for that more certain dollar. It's no longer about making the best game of Z genre. It's about ticking the most boxes to please the most people so the game will sell everywhere enough to fill greedy men's pockets with money.
I vividly remember when I saw the first game with filtered textures on a vodoo 1 gpu. The individual pixels... were gone! It was mind blowing :)
I’m from around the same time and the amount of content to get through nowadays is insane by comparison. I could easily go and pick up a game that’s 10 years old and enjoy without feeling that old, I mean, GTA5 is 10 years old now, and Skyrim’s 13 years old.
In 1996 Mario 64 came out but if you went back 10 years people were still playing the first Super Mario Bros.