"Games won't get better than this!"

[Consignia]

Has anyone played Goldeneye on the N64 recently?

Seemed peak FPS action back then but fuck me it is horrendous.

Yeah, I took my cousin's kids to an old videogame exhibition last summer. They had a whole bunch of games, but they mostly gravitated towards the 16 player Halo suite they had in the middle. I did get one of them to briefly play Goldeneye for a match, but even though a seasoned FPS loving 13 year old couldn't get into the game at all, and barely made a frag on me. I should point out I had no nostalgia for the game and have never loved FPSs. He went back towards Halo, and I went to Sonic CD to get the freaky secret Sonic image on the screen.

[biggytitbo]

Graphical fidelity Improvements have slowed down but I think there's still big advancements to be made in ai, physics and large scale crowd simulations. The latter is a still amazingly rare in games even now, open world games are still eerily empty feeling. Hitman does it quite well but the crowds in the Paris level are obviously super basic in terms of behaviour and variety. It's the consoles that are currently holding this back because even the Xbox one x in terms of processing power is miles behind even a mid end pc.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I can't remember what SNES game it was, maybe the original Donkey Kong Country? But I used to think it looked so good, that I kind of tricked my stupid kid brain into believing it was 3D, and that the layers of parallax scrolling were actually real depth. It was one of those things where I both knew it wasn't true, but could almost see it at times. I remember getting my poor old grandma to rewatch levels with me, just so I could show off the "3D" graphics.

To think that only a few years later, I'd be showing Turok 2 to a girl I fancied.

Poor Grandma, left behind.   

I remember how before I got my voodoo 3 graphics card I used to play the original Carmageddon without any 3D acceleration for hours and my brain must've 'got used' to it. As afterwards I'd sort of marvel at how good the real world looked, like some sort of stoned teenager.

[Kelvin]

I remember how before I got my voodoo 3 graphics card I used to play the original Carmageddon without any 3D acceleration for hours and my brain must've 'got used' to it. As afterwards I'd sort of marvel at how good the real world looked, like some sort of stoned teenager.

I was a bit worried this thread would be a disaster, but it's given me some genuine lols, which I didn't expect.

[Bazooka]

Playing Body Harvest thinking this is the most accurate realisation of Greek life I have experienced yet, even having been to Greece before playing it.

[popcorn]

I still think in many ways Half-Life 2 hasn't been bettered.

No game of its type (AAA linear story thing) has matched its unified theory of everything. In Uncharted 4, you're constantly going around interacting with things by pressing X to trigger some bespoke sequence. In Half-Life 2, you fucking do it yourself, using the physics system. You overturn a bathtub to find a battery or remove a barricade from a door or clear a road of cars all using the same integrated bunch of rules. It's "real". It should have set a design standard, but no one has matched it since.

[QDRPHNC]

I vividly remember playing Sega Rally in the arcade and thinking, "Games can't get more real than this."

[Replies From View]

Ecco the Dolphin on the Sega Mega Drive has astonishingly realistic graphics that I don't think will ever be bettered.

It is quite literally "a dolphin on your television screen".

[biggytitbo]

I still think in many ways Half-Life 2 hasn't been bettered.

No game of its type (AAA linear story thing) has matched its unified theory of everything. In Uncharted 4, you're constantly going around interacting with things by pressing X to trigger some bespoke sequence. In Half-Life 2, you fucking do it yourself, using the physics system. You overturn a bathtub to find a battery or remove a barricade from a door or clear a road of cars all using the same integrated bunch of rules. It's "real". It should have set a design standard, but no one has matched it since.

Absolutely, the physics engine is the game play for most part, where even today its mostly used as a cosmetic adornment to the environments. There's hardly any game today, no matter how amazing they look, that couldn't have been done in 1998 era graphics, where's it wasn't really possible to do half life 2 until 2002-3 and it probably wasn't matched until red faction guerilla. The closest modern game I can think of to it is Just Cause 3 where most of the chaos is based around the physics engine, and that's really the whole point of the game.

[Benevolent Despot]

A physics precursor to Half-Life 2 was Jurassic Park: Tresspasser in '98. I played that back when it came out and it did have a somewhat clumsy but quite satisfying real-world physics system. The physics also spread up to the player's arm, meaning guns could get knocked out of your hand, which was annoyingly realistic. This was traded for the fact that you could pick up, drag and drop objects with your dextrous bendy arm and hand.

A couple of examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paS665grXVY
https://youtu.be/93eNKNPjIFY?t=2m29s

Whenever the next-gen consoles come they should focus more on CPU than GPU power. I doubt they will but we can hope. A lot of games just now are like walking around an art gallery. Boring.

[Timothy]

Beyond Good And Evil.

[Zetetic]

I wonder if (gaming machine) power is really the issue for more interesting simulationist-type work, or whether it's still much more matter of improving approaches to either constructing interesting systems or how they're presented to the player.

For example in the first case, strategy games still seem to rely on very traditional AI construction techniques, but we've seen academic work for a few years on machine learning for these sorts of games. I'd guess that relatively little processing power is needed to run the resulting AIs (compared to the amounts required to train them in the first place, of course, but that's not saying much perhaps).

Still considering AI, you need a degree of readability and, sometimes, clear player privilege or other kinds of gaminess (Civilisations in Civ aren't meant to play to win, or at least not just to win) and we're still seeing really interesting work here - which is still then often discarded, or at least not taken up widely. Neat examples being the amount of effort put into the readability of Halo's enemies' behaviour or how BioShock fiddled the initial moments of encountering an enemy so that players are unlikely to be killed without any idea of what killed them. Perhaps it's less about technical problems in accurately reproducing complexity than better understanding what's most relevant to creating a pleasing impression of those things.

There might be a degree of tension between these two as well - perhaps it's harder to iterate techniques around player experience of systems while you're trying to reinvent how those systems are put together. (Machine learning is certainly harder, but not impossible, to ally with fiddling with the scrutability and challenge of an AI.)

[seepage]

Rotating & zooming the terrain in Warhammer: Dark Omen, using a Voodoo 3dfx card

SU-27 Flanker in hi-res

[Sebastian Cobb]

Whenever the next-gen consoles come they should focus more on CPU than GPU power. I doubt they will but we can hope. A lot of games just now are like walking around an art gallery. Boring.

I might be wrong but I think GPU's are utilised heavily for the physics calcs these days.

[biggytitbo]

A physics precursor to Half-Life 2 was Jurassic Park: Tresspasser in '98. I played that back when it came out and it did have a somewhat clumsy but quite satisfying real-world physics system. The physics also spread up to the player's arm, meaning guns could get knocked out of your hand, which was annoyingly realistic. This was traded for the fact that you could pick up, drag and drop objects with your dextrous bendy arm and hand.

A couple of examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paS665grXVY
https://youtu.be/93eNKNPjIFY?t=2m29s

That game is pretty broken precisely because it was too far ahead of it's time, all the stuff they were trying to do probably wouldn't have practically been possible for mainstream hardware until 2 or 3 years later.

Whenever the next-gen consoles come they should focus more on CPU than GPU power. I doubt they will but we can hope. A lot of games just now are like walking around an art gallery. Boring.

Yes, that's what's holding them back now, rather than gpu power. Look at Just Cause 3, even on PS4 Pro and Xbox one x the frame rate turns to shit when you get one of the big chain reaction physics explosions.

[Zetetic]

Are Trespasser's problems really about technical limitations? Or is it more about not knowing how to make such a game play at that point?

Arguably the biggest technical issue is about a lack of hardware that would allow sufficient control and feedback over your arm - unless you think that's meant to be quite as painful as it is.

[Zetetic]

What perhaps really set HL2 apart was clear principles in design, backed up with an awful lot of playtesting and telemetry as part of that.

[Sin Agog]

Giants: Citizen Kabuto and Outcast.  I think the latter was using some new res technique that didn't involve polygons.  Made it look quite unique at the time.  Also required certain hardware that pretty much scuppered its chances of success from the outset.  The characters looked a little dried-out and mummy-like, but whatever graphical tech they were using (pentagons?  octagons?  triangles?) did make for some pretty cool environmental effects for the time.  The water especially.  Felt like an impossibly large world.  And Giants: CK, where each section had a totally different style of gunplay, from actiony tower defence to a giant Godzilla creature just smushing shit, seemed completely different from everything else at the time.  I guess a few games like Spore did that style later on, but I still think Giants holds up great.

[Z]

Outcast used some variant of voxels for the environment iirc.

That 98 jurassic park game has been getting mentioned a lot around me lately. Is it something worth checking out as a curio?



RE: half life 2, so I played psi ops before half life 2, which was another game with havok physics from around the same time. I think this had a huge impact on how revelatory half life 2 seemed. Like, psi ops done a pretty damn good job with the physics engine itself.

[Zetetic]

I'd say that Trespasser is worth about 30 minutes of your time.

As a disability simulator it's sort of interesting even - the game gives you only one good arm (which is presumably a consequence of other design decisions as much as one in itself...) and then asks you to control that arm without any proprioception or sense of touch.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

It sounds like a forerunner of things like Goat Simulator and Octodad, except that those play up the wonky controls for a laugh.

[popcorn]

What perhaps really set HL2 apart was clear principles in design, backed up with an awful lot of playtesting and telemetry as part of that.

Yes. HL2 wasn't the first game to have a physics system as know them today, and billions of games have technically superior physics engines today.

But it remains the only game of its type to actually make them the core of its design. It uses physics to holistically integrate lots of different elements - you catch a grenade and throw it back using exactly the same system you place a crate or push a car. It's a design triumph.

Been over a decade and nothing has matched it. Bioshock and Dead Space have gravity gun-style tools, but are only used for occasional, specific puzzle solving. Uncharted still uses "press triangle to enter a bespoke pushing-object-mode for this particular kind of object" design.

[bgmnts]

Half Life 2 has great gameplay driven narrative. That alone sets it apart.

[Rolf Lundgren]

The first Medal of Honour game was the first game I played on the PS2 and single handedly carrying out the D-Day landings was exactly the type of thing I wanted to be doing in a war game.

I'm still impressed by the scope of open world games and the fact that virtually anywhere on the map in a game like GTA or Far Cry can be explored. When you've grown up playing games with backgrounds that are lifeless and often just scenery then being able to go anywhere is a novelty that never wears off.

[Z]

The first Medal of Honour game was the first game I played on the PS2 and single handedly carrying out the D-Day landings was exactly the type of thing I wanted to be doing in a war game.

3rd/4th Medal of Honor game, that one, I can't remember if it's a port of the 3rd one or not.

[Kelvin]

This Gamecube tech demo of Link fighting Ganondorf notoriously set expectations very high for the next Zelda game in 2000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEF9Utdu-L0

So high in fact, that when they revealed the LOZ: Wind Waker a year later, there was a considerable backlash against the cartoony art style:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ7riCXrDxY


In retrospect, though, it's absolutely laughable how much better the second, cartoony style has aged, over the Ganondorf demo. All that anger, all that disappointment, and the infamous "why aren't they clapping" line from the developers, and yet, looking back, I'd argue that Wind Waker is remembered so fondly almost entirely because of the artstyle. In gameplay terms, it's actually a pretty mediocre entry in the series (which still makes it good), but one which has so much charm and personality, it's widely considered one of the best. Ironically, that art-style ended up being the game's greatest asset. If it had gone with a more realistic style, I'm convinced it wouldn't be remembered so well.       

[Rolf Lundgren]

3rd/4th Medal of Honor game, that one, I can't remember if it's a port of the 3rd one or not.

You're right, Frontline. It was the first of the series on PS2, forgot about the PS ones.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Nintendo's bright and cartoony stuff always seems to stand the test of time better than the competition's dark and moody games, but nobody seems to learn anything.

[brat-sampson]

I'd go with the Spaceworld GCN Demo reel too. It just looked so far ahead, to me, than my N64/Dreamcast, and even like a huge leap ahead of the PS2, which it was. It was like, dude, they're making spherical objects, malleable-looking crafted shapes. What more could you even want?

Of course then HD didn't exist and I was dramatically less aware of the effect of, say, lighting or texture quality. But in terms of being blown the fuck away by something, Gamecube reel was it. That or the first Oblivion screenshots.

[Kelvin]

Nintendo's bright and cartoony stuff always seems to stand the test of time better than the competition's dark and moody games, but nobody seems to learn anything.

This is true. Even their N64 games have aged better (relatively) than most other 64 era games.