Leafy

iTrader: (1)

I think I did it in 4, but it took a concerted effort to go back for session 3 and 4. Not that it was particularly bad. The story was not too predictable, but it did get really annoying towards the end where you had the same splicers that used to be easy as **** to kill all of a sudden taking a whole magazine.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Posit:

Consider the worst videogame you have ever played. How much would it have been improved by ultra-photorealistic graphics?

Consider the best videogame you have ever played. Would it have been rendered worthless and unplayable if the graphics had been 1 or 2 generations out of date?




Posit:

Consider those titles which we consider to be landmark achievements in videogaming- those which were so incredibly popular that they have entered the common idiom of popular culture, inspired an entire generation of imitators, are depicted on T-shirts and lunchboxes, and/or had saturday morning cartoons made in their likeness.

Space Invaders.
Pac-Man.
Super Mario Bros.
Sonic the Hedgehog.
Wolfenstein 3d (I'll also accept Doom as an alternate.)

None of these games had anything more than an 8 bit color depth at 320x200, with the majority running at far less. Space Invaders was black & white.




Posit:

Ignoring pack-in titles, the overall #1 selling game on the XB360 is Halo 3 with 14 million copies sold, and for the PS3 it's Gran Turismo 5 with 10.7 million copies.

Super Mario Bros 3 sold 18 million copies on the NES, and Pokemon Red/Blue sold 23.6 million copies on the original B&W Gameboy.

The latter titles did not employ 3D graphics or Hollywood-level cinematography.

Leafy

iTrader: (1)

Yes, DOOM I would have been ruined for me if it was being drawn with pen on paper as I was "playing" it. Unless it was being done by a massive team of asians able to keep up with 30fps, then I'd be ok with it.

Actually I think technically 2 generations out of date would have been ascII graphics.

triple88a

iTrader: (2)

Its a lot more bauce playing at 5760x1080 :P

NastyNate

iTrader: (1)

You know that pink coral you'd see all over the place? On the pc it looked like it was glowing. At the lowest graphic settings on my old pc it still looked better than the 360.

richyvrlimited

iTrader: (1)

I do see your point, gameplay > * however, when Wolf3D/Doom came out, they had some of the best graphics I had ever seen, they were top of the line, they weren't top class games in spite of their graphics, they were top class games with amazing graphics.

The amazing graphics don't look so much now, but at the time it certainly helped the game to be come even more amazing (well it did to my pre-pubescent eyes anyway).

Erat

iTrader: (5)

This is the console war thread. We brought up the WiiU, but what about the Ouya. (oo-ya?)(how the hell do you say that?)

An android based gaming console. Able to play really affordable games that would be similar to tablet games (maybe not, i really don't know). But it's $99 and seems alright. Plus they're not a public company, it was a kickstarter program, so that's nice. I like the fact that they even say it will be easy to open up and allow addon hardware. This would be something more for me (as far as sit in front of the TV and play silly games like angry birds, or little wings). SUPER affordable games, even free. Indie games (not having to pay liscensing fees), "steam" like store. Modds and addons. It says it is all cloud based(doesn't have or need lots of internal memory(unlike xbone)), so perhaps being able to hook up to a home network, streaming(if it is capable of this i'll buy one)?? I guess it was at E3 and they pissed some people off. lol

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

I prefered the orginial Sierra release of Hero's Quest over the VGA remake Quest for Glory 1: So you want to be a hero.

triple88a

iTrader: (2)

8 bit games were the ****.

Full_Tilt_Boogie

iTrader: (1)

Theres also this thing:



Newegg.com - NVIDIA SHIELD Gaming Portable, 5" 720p Retinal Display, Tegra 4 Mobile Processor, Android Jelly Bean, 802.11n

Not that I care, because PC R BEST

We might as well talk about handhelds now. My gf has a Vita and its awesome sauce because of all the JRPG and visual novels available for it that are not otherwise available in the US. Of course a lotof people are not into that kind of stuff

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Yes, Wolf/Doom stand out in the pack- featuring both incredible graphics AND revolutionary gameplay.

Of none of the other titles which I listed can this also be said. The graphics in Pac Man, Space Invaders, Super Mario Bros, etc., are (were) at best fair by the standards of their day, and unremarkable by any count. These titles succeeded on content alone, with no flash. Heck, consider Pokemon on the gameboy; 160×144 resolution and 4 shades of grey, and it's the #1 best-selling videogame in the history of mankind.

By contrast, would ET, Link: The Faces of Evil or Shaq-Fu have been any better if they'd had the most revolutionary graphics of their time?



It's interesting that Leavy mentioned games "being drawn by hand in real-time as you play them." Why? Because this has actually happened- sort of.

In 1983, ex-Disney director Don Bluth (The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, etc) brought us Dragon's Lair, a revolutionary arcade game which presented Hollywood-quality cel animated graphics via an internal Laserdisc player, in which the player assumed the role of brave knight Dirk the Daring in his effort to rescue Princess Daphne from the evil dragon Singe.




It was followed a year later by Space Ace, which used the same basic technology and storyline.




Now, those aren't cover art or posters, they are actual screenshots of a videogame from the early 1980s!

While the novelty factor draw large crowds at first, both games are remembered today principally for being catastrophic commercial failures which materially contributed to the eventual bankruptcy of Cinematronics and inspired precisely zero imitators in the years to come.

Why?

Because the gameplay sucked ***. Lots of people played the game once, just to see what it was like.

Very few made a habit of it.



I stand by my conviction: so long as they are not so bad that they substantially detract from the ability to actually play the game, graphics alone are not materially relevant to the awesomeness of a videogame.





You know, now that I think about it, I don't think I ever played any of the VGA remakes. I started with Sierra around Space Quest 1, and sort of drifted away around the time that the first-gen VGA-native games were coming out (KQ5, SQ4.)

But yeah, Hero's Quest was one of the good ones.

FRT_Fun

iTrader: (19)

I 100% agree with Joe regarding gameplay and graphics. A game can be great with **** graphics and awesome gameplay. But **** gameplay with awesome graphics is still garbage. Obviously best of both worlds is ideal, but not a must.

I still play pokemon on my GBC, and just bought a 3DS for the sole purpose of playing X & Y when they come out (3d pokemon!!). I've just been playing black 2 to pass the time. If they could just bring that great game play together with console graphics and make a console version that follows the same basic idea of the game boy it would be perfect.

triple88a

iTrader: (2)

I agree but many will disagree with you. I had a buddy that would play at 10fps just to keep graphics maxed out. Seen many people like him that wouldn't touch counter strike with a 10 foot pole just because of the low mesh count graphics.

FRT_Fun

iTrader: (19)

True true. There are definitely always exceptions. Some people it's all about graphics. But it's usually those same people that play a game once and then never touch it again. Those really amazing games last throughout the advances in technology and still keep you dusting off the PS, PS2, GBC, etc... to play through the games again.

triple88a

iTrader: (2)

Remember the original mortal kombats? Yeah many people wouldnt touch those because of the "not so pretty graphics".

FRT_Fun

iTrader: (19)

I loved MK. I don't know if I played the originals (It was on a Sega Genesis). ABACABB was the blood code. Still remember that ****. Scorpion would say "GET OVER HERE" after you typed it in. Ahhh memories.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

And many like him will happily spend thousands of dollars on multiple high-end GPUs configured in parallel (SLI / Crossfire) to achieve "maxed out" levels of detail at high framerates.

I don't get it, but I do acknowledge it.

It's funny that you bring this up, actually. As part of that last rant, I was going to add a paragraph to the effect of "It's not as though the top-grossing film of the year title consistently goes to whichever picture featured the most stunning CGI explosions." But then when I actually went to do the research, I discovered that I was, in fact, dead wrong about that.

I guess this makes sense, actually. My brother-in-law is pretty typical of your average "highly enthusiastic moviegoer," and about the only things he ever goes to see are your typical comic-book-comes-to-life / lots of **** blows up sort of films. Personally, I find them tedious to the point of unwatchable, but then I'm clearly not voting with my wallet in this regard.




I predict that within ten years, GPU technology will have evolved to the point where it becomes feasible to use highly iterative raytracing and solid models as opposed to the rasterized scanline rendering of polygons for 3d gaming.

On the whole, the quality of games will not be greatly affected in terms of playability. The most significant consequence of this transition will simply be that I (and people like me) will shake our heads even harder while asking "You paid HOW MUCH for that video card?"

Within a few years after this, said technology will transition over to the console market. The PS8 and Xbox -3 will introduce raytracing to the set-top space, along with some other random technology or policy that will cause people to proclaim this as "the end of console gaming."

Nintendo, meanwhile, will continue raking in record profits with the Wooooohoooo, combining decade-old GPU technology and a weak, limited processor with a revolutionary new user interface that is placed up the nose and transmits the player's thoughts directly to the console.



And, of course, some people will still argue that 200 FPS > 100 FPS, even though their monitors continue to utilize a 60 FPS refresh rate.

triple88a

iTrader: (2)

You hear of the Nvidia Titan? 1k for a video card that is slower than 2 560s in sli... 1k.

hochkis

I assume this has to do with the crudely conceived notion of a turbo encabulator?

Full_Tilt_Boogie

iTrader: (1)

Ray tracing is used a bit already in pre rendered models and in cubemaps (which may or may not be pre-rendered).
The idea of it being all ray tracing, all the time, is quite cool. I imagine we will eventually get there, with moore's law and all.

Lots of the "pretty" modern games are really not very pretty to the trained eye. Graphics standards have not moved forward much since ~2004. What they have done is made textures more contrasty and HDR looking. Youre average joe sees the oversharpened/overcontrasty/HDR textures in a new Cowaduty game and think it looks amazing, when in reality the textures are no higher resolution than the previous handful of games.

2004: Hl2 textures- low res textures by today standards, but based on reality:


2012: COD Black-Ops II (PC)- higher res textures, looks like a photo that was molested in photoshop: