> The PlayStation 2’s library is easily among the best of any console ever released, and even if you were to narrow down the list of games to the very best, you’d be left with dozens (more like hundreds) of incredible titles. But the PS2 hardware is getting a bit long in the tooth
Besides the library, the PS2 is the most successful video game console of all time in terms of number of units shipped, and it stayed on the market for over ten years, featured a DVD drive, and at one point was positioned by Sony not just as an entertainment appliance but as a personal computer, including their own official PS2 Linux distribution.
In a more perfect world, this would have:
(a) happened with a hypothetical hardware platform released after the PS2 but before the PS3, with specs lying in between the two: a smidge better than the former, but not quite as exotic as the latter (with its Cell CPU or the weird form factor; whereas the PS2's physical profile in comparison was perfect, whether in the original form or the Slim version), which could have:
(b) resulted in a sort of standardization in the industry like what happened to the IBM PC and its market of clones, with other vendors continuing to manufacture semi-compatible units even if/when Sony discontinued it themselves, periodically revving the platform (doubling the amount of memory here, providing a way to tap into higher clock speeds there) all while maintaining backwards compatibility such that you would be able to go out today and buy a brand new, $30 bargain-bin, commodity "PS2 clone" that can do basic computing tasks on it (in other words, not including the ability to run a modern Web browser or Electron apps), can play physical media, and supports all the original games and any other new games that explicitly target(ed) the same platform, or you could pay Steam Machine 2026 prices for the latest-gen "PS2" that retains native support for the original titles of the very first platform revision but unlocks also the ability to play those for every intermediate rev, too.
This is cool but of course it's only going to be a small handful of titles that ever receive this kind of attention. But I have been blown away that now sub-$300 Android handhelds are more than capable of emulating the entire PS2 library, often with upscaling if you prefer.
Moore's law never ceases to amaze (the vulgar version where we're talking compute/dollar, not the transistor count doubling rate.) It won't be too long before phones are running AI models with performance equal to or better than current frontier models running on $100 million dollar clusters. It's hard to even imagine the things that will be running on billion dollar clusters in 10 years.
I do hope you're right, but I'm quite skeptical. As mobile devices get more and more locked down, All that memory capacity gets less and less usable. I'm sure it will be accessible to Apple and Google models, but models that obey the user? Not likely
As state of the art machines continue to chase the latest node, capacity for older nodes has become much less expensive, more openly documented, and actually accessible to individuals. Open source FPGA and ASIC synthesis tools have also immensely improved in quality and capability. The Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 contains an open source Risc-V core designed by an individual. And 4G cell phones like the https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck-pro are available on the market built around the very similar ESP32. The latest greatest will always be behind a paywall, but the rising tide floats all boats, and hobbyist projects are growing more sophisticated. Even a $1 ESP32 has dual 240mhz 32bit cores, 8Mb ram, and fast network interfaces which blow away the 8bit micros I grew up with. The state of the open-source art may be a bit behind the state of the proprietary arts, but is advancing as well.
It's really fun to have useful hardware that's easy to program at the bare metal.
chipfoundry.io charges $14,950 for packaged 100 chips. As far as small batch manufacturing goes, that's reasonably affordable. $149 ea. Occasionally I see better deals crop up as part of group buys or for bare dies. Presumably, one would prototype their design on an inexpensive FPGA board first, to verify functionality. So as to be reasonably sure the first batch of chips worked. Folks like Sam Zeloof are working to build new tools for one-off and small batch designs as well, which may further reduce small quantity prices.
It might not be in our lifetimes... the frontier models are using terabytes of RAM. In 10 years iPhones went from ~2GB to ~8GB.
2012 Macbook pros had up to 16gb, 2026 maxes out at 64gb. So 4x increase in 16 years. 1996 Mac desktop had 16MB of ram, so from 1996-2012 there was a 1000x increase.
We won't see gains like we did from the 80s-2000s again.
> compute/dollar
That's ironic because building a PC is getting more expensive than last year for the first time.
I'm not sure this is the first time this has happened. There was a major earthquake in SE Asia which wrecked chip production for a year and prices went up quite a lot.
Heh, well, they didn't say memory/dollar
And storage. And processing.
I don't think you're going to see phones with 512gb VRAM+RAM in your lifetime.
When I was a kid I recall my cousin upgrading his computer to 1 or 2 MB so that we could get some extra features when playing Wing Commander 1. That was 1990.
35 years later, burner phones regularly come with 4 GB of RAM these days. 3 order of magnitude difference, not taking into account miniaturization and speed improvements.
In another 35 years who knows what will happen. Yeah things can't improve at the same pace forever but I would be surprised if anyone back in 1990 could predict the level of technology you can get at every corner store today.
Maybe it's not that everyone gets an RTX 5090 in our pocket, but maybe it's that LLMs now can run on rpi. Realistically it's probably something in the middle.
When I was a kid in Elementary we used DOS computers with maybe 4MB of RAM or few MB and the Play Station wasn't many times powerful. A few years (two or three) later we got Windows 95/98 with 128 times more RAM. A few years later, computers could emulate more or less the PSX and the N64, all within six years.
The PlayStation 5 (16GB) has only twice as much RAM as the PlayStation 4 (8GB), and the PlayStation 6 will likely have just 1.5x as much as the PS5: 24GB. And even that might be optimistic with the recent explosion of memory price.
This is a joke right? Not even 10 years ago the first phones with 4GB RAM came out, today there are quite a few phones with 24GB. At that rate we'll be at 512GB by around 2040.
Phones have as much memory as Android requires, not much more. A low end thinkpad 10 years ago had 8gb memory, and today is same capacity bit more modern and faster. By the same rate we would have a very very fast 8gb memory thinkpad by 2040. Same thing with GPUs. Mid range GPU 10 years ago had 12gb VRAM, mid range AMD GPU last generation (6600xt) had 8gb and 7600xt 16gb, Nvidia 5060 comes at 8gb/16gb.
Phones with 4gb ram is not feasible today because they wouldnt be able to run Android and phone home comfortably, even being a thin client requires running Android and react application on electron. 4gb is not good.
In 2040 phones will came out with the bare minimum to run Android, all the stupid Chinese apps Android distro pushes into consumers, and a react application on electron.
Maybe he fell for the 12 + 12 crap they advertise where half the memory is swap
I took it as a comment on the economics of RAM, but I think the current state is transitory (does AI continue apace? Prices will eventually justify more competitors, even at tremendous startup cost. AI crashes? More RAM for the proles)
A tech-optimist would perceive this as a death-threat! :,-)
> ... It won't be too long before phones are running AI models with performance equal to or better than current frontier models running on $100 million dollar clusters.
Maybe, perhaps phones will have the compute power... But not enough memory. If things continue the way they are, that is. Great for AI firms, they'll have their moat.
DRAM price actually hasn't decreased much over the last 10 to 15 years. In the decades before, there was a huge increase in memory capacity, perhaps even exponential like for transistors.
Well, we live in extraordinary circumstances today. A $40 kit (Patriot Viper Venom DDR5-6000 C36 16GB) is now $199. And that is the cheapest DDR5 I saw. With this year's news of even more allocation towards data centres, Micron exiting the consumer market, and the current inertia of things, I think it will take quite some time for us to see prices back to as they were.
In the same way we have websites running on disposable vapes, it may not be long before such a device could run a small local LLM, and lots of appliances could have a local voice interface - so you literally talk to your microwave!
They will not build that phone because then you won’t subscribe to AI cloud platforms.
It really is incredible. I've been playing through my childhood games on retro handhelds, and recently jumped from <$100 handhelds to a Retroid Pocket Flip, and it's incredible. Been playing WiiU and PS2 games flawlessly at 2x res, and even tackling some lighter Switch games on it.
It truly is. My issue though, like in 2010 when I built an arcade cabinet capable of playing everything is you eventually just run out of interest. In it all. Not even the nostalgia of it keeps my attention. With the exception of just a small handful of titles.
- Excite Bike (it’s in its own league) NES
- Punchout (good arcade fun) NES
- TMNT 4-P Coop Mame Version
- NBA Jam Mame Version
- Secret of Mana SNES
- Chronotrigger SNES
- Breath of Fire 2 SNES
- Mortal Kombat Series SEGA32X
- FF Tactics PS1
I know these can all be basically run in a browser at this point but even Switch or Dreamcast games were meh. N64/PS1/PS2/Xbox was peak and it’s been rehashed franchises ever since. Shame. The only innovative thing that has happened since storytelling died has been Battle Royale Looter Shooters.
Outer Wilds, Baba is You, Blue Prince, Hades 1&2, Disco Elysium, Hollow Knight, Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors, Clair Obscur, What Remains of Edith Finch, 1000xResist, Return of the Obra Dinn, Roboquest, Rocket League, Dark Souls, etc. I could go on, and on, and...
Not rehashes. Original, phenomenal games covering damm near every genre and if there is a genre you're missing, I can find a modern game to match.
Do you actually engage with modern games?
A large part of this is because the latency on modern TVs can be anywhere between 4.7ms and 150ms so games have to allow for a lot of slack in their input.
The NES and SNES had 1-3 frames of latency depending on the game.
Oh they absolutely do - you just might be unfamiliar with them. I grew up playing Ninja Gaiden, Megaman, etc. There's definitely an audience for 2D games with extremely tight controls. Off the top of my head:
- Shovel Knight
- Spelunky 1/2
- Rogue Legacy
- Cuphead
NES games are pretty darn slow and not very twitchy at all compared to something like Super Meat Boy. I’m not into the genre too much but I know there are quite a few more of them. And Street Fighter still requires very exact frame execution if you want to take it to the extreme.
I’m as nostalgic as anyone, but games today are just so much better in every way.
Dark Souls and Hollow Knight were among the listed titles, come on.
Have you tried UFO 50?
I just listed a few games off the top of my head, and in contrast to the person who I responded to having listed a bunch of 90s/early 2000s games. In comparison, mine are certainly modern.
If you want "modern", 5 years old maximum, then we have, for example:
Backpack Battles. Elden Ring(Nightreign). Tainted Grail. Monster Train 2. Escape from Duckov. Nine Sols. Hollow Knight Silksong. Black Myth Wukong. WH 40k Rogue Trader. WH 40k Space Marine 2. Spirit of the North 2. Patrick's Parabox. Stacklands. Balatro. Ender Lilies/Magnolia. Tunic. ANIMAL WELL. Dome Keeper. Inscryption. Reus 2. Astral Ascent.
I just had a scroll through my steam library and picked some games I really like/love that felt like they should be less than 5 years old. I've not double checked. This is what I meant by "etc. I could go on, and on, and...". I wasn't saying that cause I ran out of games to list.
Elden Ring, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Baldur's Gate 3, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Dredge, Blue Prince, Balatro, Astro Bot, Hades II, Silksong, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Pacific Drive, Death Stranding 2, Split Fiction
This. Half-life was amazing, and not because it was Quake 2. It was a story. Less about blowing stuff up with guns and more about uncovering the secrets of Black Mesa. Then came along mods…
The first one was Team Fortress. Remember that? Still strong today as a ftp title TF2. The second one was a spec-ops style delta force mod (I can’t remember the name) but it gave the 3rd modder the idea that a modern setting could work. Counter-Strike was released as an early alpha on my forum and the rest was history.
I mention this because this was a tuning point from fixed function pipelines to programmable pipelines (shaders).
There was this awe of what we can do, what could be possible, and today’s modern games are a fulfillment of that. I feel this same sense of awe when it comes to some of these foundational models. It’s just incredible what they are capable of.
In reality, while AAA titles have been pumping out annual titles to keep shares high and pigs fat, there have been some wonderful indie titles, smaller budget games, that have made a significant impact on the games industry as a whole.
I hope I never become this jaded and cynical about video games.
So, is Outer Wilds a RPG or a platformer?
>>Good games, but not innovative
Calling outer wilds or Clair Obscur "not innovative" just tells me you haven't played these games from start to finish, and I don't mean any offence saying this. Unless you mean just mechanically?
What did you think after you got into room 46 of Blue Prince?
So Dark Souls is just another RPG, and not innovative?
>The only innovative thing that has happened since storytelling died
lol
There are countless already classic modern story driven games which pushing the boundaries of video games forward.
I know nostalgia is a very strong drug and I also love the games I grew up with in the 90s but it's pure ignorance to say that 1, "storytelling died" 2, no innovation happened in video games in modern times (whatever that even means)
These days there's 200-350 new games released on steam every week. There's plenty of excellent narrative driven games if that's what you're after, mostly from indie developers.
If you're looking for deep narrative from AAA games, then the best you'll find are games like Cyberpunk 2077 - which have some decent writing in between all the action. But if you want something that'll really scratch a strong narrative itch, you gotta go deep on indies. That's where all the experimentation is happening.
You might also just be getting more genre savvy with age. When you're a kid, story beats are mind blowing. But most narratives - especially in games - tack pretty close to classic hero arcs. Once you've seen 100 of them you can often predict the entire narrative arc once you've seen the end of the first act. In other words, it might not be that games have gotten worse. It might just be that you've gotten better at understanding classic narrative structures, so it takes more to surprise you.
>>Everything since 2018 that I have played has been relatively easy to guess the plot line
Be honest- you guessed the plot of Claire Obscure before you got to Act 3? Or the plot of Death Stranding 1 & 2 before you finished them?
What kind of games have you played since 2018? Because yeah, there is a lot of predictable cookie cutter AAA games out there, sure. But each year there are games which are surprising in their storytelling, same as somehow there are still new and surprising films despite film being much older than gaming. Not to mention books.
You thought the height of video game storytelling was the era of Mass Effect 3 and Halo Reach?
Have you played Disco Elysium? "Thank goodness you're here"? Cruelty Squad?
I disagree. There are some new (sub-) genres and great games since that period.
* Roguelites have proliferated: Hades is the most obvious example, but there are a variety of sub-genres at this point.
* Vampire Survivors (itself a roguelite) spawned survivors-likes. Megabonk is currently pretty popular.
* Slay the Spire kicked off a wave of strategy roguelites.
* There are "cozy" games like Unpacking.
* I don't recall survival games like Subnautica or Don't Starve being much of a thing in the PS2 era.
* There are automation games like Factorio and Satisfactory.
* Casual mobile games are _huge_.
* There are more experimental games, sometimes in established genres, like Inscription, Undertale, or Baba Is You.
Not to mention that new games in existing genres can be great. Hollow Knight is a good example. Metroidvanias were established by the SNES and PS1 era, but Hollow Knight really upped the stakes.
I'm sure I'm forgetting things and people will have some criticism, but I really don't believe games have stagnated in general.
Roguelites are the worst thing to happen to video games since microtransactions. It’s an extremely attractive option to the cash-strapped indie dev, as it promises infinite ‘content’ for little development effort, but what it’s really done is turned every game into a combination of cookie clicker and a slot machine.
The fact that you think arcade games have “no interesting progression” shows just how toxic the roguelike design pattern is. The progression in arcade games is you getting better at the game. If a game needs a “progress system” to communicate a sense of accomplishment to the player, that’s because the gameplay is shallow.
For the oldies but goodies in my list:
- Any one of the 194_ games
- Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past
- Super Mario World
- Final Fantasy VI, VII, IX
- Chrono Trigger (agree)
- Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition
- Metal Gear Solid 1-3, MGS: Peace Walker
But I think there's been good stuff since.
- The Super Mario Galaxy games
- Super Monkey Ball
- MGS4, MGS5
- Witcher 3
- The Bioshock games
- Minecraft-- probably the game with the most replay value of anything of all time.
I don't know what will stand the test of time. I don't want to play any of these games now, since I've burnt them out, but at some point I'll likely want to play them again...
- Undertale
- Bravely Default
- The Octopath games
- Dispatch
- AstroBot
- Clair Obscur
Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition (whichever was the one with the most characters) as well as Street Fighter Alpha were great for the arcade machine.
Most of my buddies at the time would come over, have a beer, immediately hang it on the boat-coozy cup holders (the ones that gyro) and go to town shoulder to shoulder playing SF2. The cup holders gyro would prevent the beers from spilling as the arcade cabinet rocked back and forth from two grown men having a virtual fist fight. Best times.
Playing Metal Gear Solid 2 was one of my fondest memories I cherish. I could play it only at Taekwondo gym I was attending to. I couldn't finish it because I only had a couple of hours at the gym and I could play only during break time. Oh and I was always waiting for the break time!
If you're struggling with keeping your attention, you ought to try making a list of games you never finished (or never played) and commit yourself to playing through them in order. I have been doing that with NES games and really enjoying it. I alternate between RPGs/adventures and action games, to mix things up a bit.
Recently, I have played through Faxanadu, Dragon Warrior, Blaster Master, and am now working through Fire Emblem (translated from Japanese).
Baldur's Gate 3 has awesome story telling for video game standards. Plan 100+ hours for a reasonably complete first playthrough though.
To be fair BG3 is not without its AI problems. Be it stupid companions walking into danger or getting stuck or enemies that do nonsensical things. It also has a ton of glitches as detailed in the excellent bg3.wiki or shown by speedrunners.
It's a complex game and I don't mind that whatsoever. With games I like I generally tread a careful path to not accidentally break it too badly (though there's also intended ways to break the game, like sacrificing Gale to BOOOAL and having the world blow up in three long rests, or destroying an important book in Gauntlet of Shar). Crashes have been few.
Also, without the wiki I wouldn't have enjoyed my first playthrough thus far as much as I do as it's really easy to miss things. Kinda intrigued by BG1/2 now.
Guess I'll have to play the other BGs next...
> N64/PS1/PS2/Xbox was peak and it’s been rehashed franchises ever since. Shame. The only innovative thing that has happened since storytelling died has been Battle Royale Looter Shooters.
I was a kid when ps1/n64 came out so I also have a lot of nostalgia about that era of gaming.
However…
There are a ton of great games out there from this era. Hell, the Uncharted series and Expedition 33 will get you 100-200 hours of excellent gameplay, Elden ring is another 200. Lies of P is a fantastic game, 50-100 more. The star wars Legos and star wars Harry Potter games are a lot of fun to play with kids, and Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the Zelda games we wanted on n64 as a kid, I love those games. And they’re not a rehash, at all.
There’s a lot of fun things out there to play if you poke around. Your local library might surprise you with the collection for completely free games you can borrow. Modern games even.
> There was a time when you were given just enough narrative to understand the world you were in, but nothing more. Your story was your own making.
You should _really_ check out Elden Ring. If you're not playing with a notebook (and you're not looking anything up) you're doing it wrong. No quest ledger, no waypoints. Shit, the story is mostly up to interpretation. It is literally the game you're describing above.
You don't play Zelda because your kids are grown? What kind of logic is this?
Paradox of choice. When you were single digit/low double years old, and you only had 3 games, you had to play the shit out of them. With every game available at your fingertips, there's no such compunction.
Renting games was a thing. I had about 30 SNES games, and likely played more than 200.
What really happens when talking about retro games is that people remember the remarkable stuff. There were plenty of shitty games back then, they are just rightly forgotten.
Blockbuster and Funco Land gave me all the titles I could get my 7 year old fingers on.
It's called getting older.
As a grown adult, nothing can recreate the feeling of exploring a new game as a child/teen. Especially during the 80s/90s, where gaming as a whole was new and rapidly-evolving.
But revisiting old favourites for the nostalgia can still be enjoyable.
What? Dreamcast was a marvel when it came to games, Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis, Power Stone, Jet Set Radio, Grandia, SoulCalibur etc.
Jet Set Radio Spiritual Sequel is getting to be its own genre at this point.
I've heard great things about Shenmue from a friend. Probably not my kind of game, but very highly rated by critics.
Say way? Crazy Taxi? The Dreamcast had an amazing library! Sonic Adventures Shenmue(1,2), Grandia 2, Skies of Arcadia, Virtua Tennis, Entire 2k sports series, Samba de Amigo, House of the dead, Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive 2, Jet Grind Radio, Test Drive LeMans, F355 Challenge, Rez, ...the list goes one
The weird yet cool games Roommania, Segaga, Seaman
Of course many of these games got ported over later on the other consoles or had sequels release on system after the Dreamcast's demise
The Demons Souls lineage titles are another valuable innovation (I understand the earlier inspirations it had but those aren't playable like these modern ones)
For MAME I recommend trying Pang and Super Buster Bros
And then folks waste whole that power away, with embedded widgets applications.
My Android phone is more powerful than the four PCs I owned during the 1990 - 2002, 386SX - P75 - P166 - Athlon XP, all CPU, GPU, RAM and disk space added together.
I sit here with a laggy windows 11 computer with an Nvidia GPU and wonder: WTF
Its fine with Fedora, but Windows 11 is terrible.
Another one full of Webview2 instances because new hires cannot code anything else, apparently.
They aren't to blame, management is.
Maybe. I had a director that fired anyone who wouldn't use Microsoft Power Automate.
Previous to that director, I built stuff in python for 5 years under a different director.
I'll take a longbet with you that this or successors tackle more than a small handful of titles
We live in interesting times
I find PS2 emulation to be lacking.
Of course I am spoiled by Dolphin and their meticulous work, and the leap in N64 emulation, and PS3 emulation is way farther than I thought it could ever be.
But PCSX2 is mediocre. It reports the vast majority of the library in "green" emulation state, but that usually means there are glaring issues that someone is choosing to overlook, like shadows that are broken.
The Ace Combat games for example are all broken with the hardware accelerated renderer. Things run like garbage in the software renderer for a lot of games. Multiplayer functionality is spotty and hard to set up and poorly documented.
The state of emulation of that console generation is not up to snuff, save for Dolphin. It's still very much in the "Shut up, it works fine for Super Mario 64 so it works" mindset it seems.
This is true even of official emulators! The Xbox emulator that ran on the Xbox 360 has many games that are "officially supported" with serious issues. Forza Motorsport 1 has weird slowdowns on key tracks. I understand the serious hardware difficulties but I still wish emulation accuracy was an option.
I suspect we will see a proliferation of emulator development in the next few years.
In a lot of ways, emulators are the perfect problem for vision/LLMs. It's like all those web browser projects popping up on HN. You have a very well define problem with existing reference test cases. It's not going to be fun for Nintendo's lawyers in future when everybody can crowdfund an emulator by simply running a VLM against a screen recording of gameplay (barring non deterministic éléments).
They can't oppress the software engineering masses any longer through lawfare.
I gave up video games, but I remember that being a huge reason why I picked Android a decade + ago. Emulators :D
Apparently now iphone allows it. Eventually Apple gives features that are standard elsewhere. Veblen goods...
Emulation is amazing for access right now. Recompilation is about making sure MGS2 or GT4 still runs in 2045 on whatever weird hardware we're using then
There is so much work hunting down the proper upscaled/improved texture packs though. Supposedly.
What the dev of AertherSx2 did to run games smooth, even on my midrange 2019 android phone, is wonders.
Too bad the dev is a very emotionally unstable person that abandoned his port, despite his big talent.
On the flip side, maybe those traits are what lead to the existence of the emulator in the first place. Better something than nothing.
Wasn't he hounded by users as usual?
Yeah and he didn't want to deal with receiving death threats for working on a passion project. Which I guess is considered being "emotionally unstable".
I have no knowledge of this instance, but death threats and being attacked and stalked online tends to cause emotional instability.
Link to the actual project rather than just a news article about it https://github.com/ran-j/PS2Recomp
On this topic of ports/recomps there's also OpenGOAL [1] which is a FOSS desktop native implementation of the GOAL (Game Oriented Assembly Lisp) interpreter [2] used by Naughty Dog to develop a number of their famous PS2 titles.
Since they were able to port the interpreter over they have been able to start rapidly start porting over these titles even with a small volunteer team.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp
Thats incredible, I had no idea Jak&Daxter was written with Emacs as the primary IDE!
Lol yep. Emacs as the IDE, Allegro Common Lisp as the interpreter + HAL implementation, and GOAL itself being a Scheme-like.
Naughty Dog in general was actually a primarily Lisp studio for a long time. It was only in the PS3 era with Uncharted and The Last of Us that they switched to C++ because trying to maximise the performance out of a Lisp interpreter environment with the complexity the Cell Processors added on a time and cash budget simply wasn't feasible for them.
The Crash Bandicoot games were written in GOOL (Game Oriented Object Lisp) which they wrote prior to GOAL and the Jak and Daxter games. GOOL/Lisp of course was extremely important for the Crash Bandicoot legacy because by writing their own higher level interpreter they were given an excuse to through away the entire standard library that Sony gave them and start from scratch. That process allowed them to write a massively more performant stdlib and execution environment leading to Crash Bandicoot being able to support game environments an order of magnitude more complex than other games at the time could. And of course this allowed them to build in a system for lazy loading the environment as the player progressed through the levels which firmly cemented Naughty Dog in the video games history books.
Andy Gavin actually has an incredible blog site (including a 13 part series on Crash Bandicoot and a 5 part series on Jak and Daxter) that has over the decades documented the history of their studio's game development process and all the crazy things they did to make their games work on hardware where it really shouldn't have been able to with the tools they were provided.
Oh I should issue a minor correction. After talking with some people more familiar with it than me, Crash had a lot written in GOOL but it's not 100% GOOL like how Jak is 100% GOAL.
Instead it's mostly enemy AI and the like which are built in GOOL and the game itself is instead a more traditional systems language (I believe C++). So instead of 100% it's more like 40/60 which tbh is still quite good.
Those blog posts are amazing. I never realised CB was Sony's unofficial flagship mascot to pit against Nintendo's Mario
Yeah I absolutely loved reading through them when I discovered them the first time. An absolute treat and a portal in time.
If PS2Recomp ends up giving us even a fraction of what OpenGOAL unlocked for Jak and Daxter, it could be a huge deal for the rest of the PS2 catalog
Absolutely. OpenGOAL really just set a new standard for what games preservation looks like.
It's incredible seeing the community taking a 25 year old game, modernising it with accessibility features and quality of life, and even creating entirely new expansions to the game [1].
Like beyond just keeping the game preserved on modern platforms, it's keeping the spirit of the game and the community attached to it alive as well in a way that it can continue to evolve and grow.
I can only pray that PS2Recomp makes this a fraction as accessible to other games from this era.
Oh and a similar project but on the nintendo side of the world is Ship of Harkinian by HarbourMasters [2] and the Zelda RE Team [3]. Zelda RET have half the Zelda games and are well on their way decompiling and reverse engineering the other half. And HarbourMasters have taken these decomps and used them as the groundwork for building comprehensive ports and remasters of these original games to a degree that fans could only dream that first party remasters and ports would attempt.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIrSHz4qw3Q
> So yes, currently playing PS2 games on PC via emulator is still absolutely fantastic, but native ports would be the holy grail of game preservation.
I would think that emulation of the original game as closely as possible would be the gold standard of preservation, and native ports would be a cool alternative. As described in the article, native ports are typically not faithful reproductions but enhanced to use the latest hardware.
Indeed, the focus for preservation would be to increase the accuracy of emulators.
pcsx2 is pretty good today in terms of running games (there is a single digit list of games it does not run), but it's far from accurate to the hardware.
Porting to current systems via recompilation is cool, but it has very little to do with preservation.
I absolutely love the idea!
As a movie geek I'm personally offended when someone says "oh, it's from 2017, it's an old movie!", or "I don't want to see anything from 90s, yuck" - and that's pretty common.
Of course, "Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens" is not for everyone, but I firmly believe that you can watch the new Dune and Lawrence of Arabia back to back and have similarly enjoyable time.
Fallout 1 and 2 are miles ahead of Fallout 3 (mostly due to uncanny valley phenomenon). Sure, the medium has changed a lot and modern consumers are used to more streamlined experience - my favorite example is the endless stream of Baldurs Gate "modern reimplementations" or rehashes, like Pilars of Eterniety that were too close to the original source, and then, suddenly, someone came up with Divinity, basically a Baldurs clone but with modern UI and QoL improvements.
But consoles are different.
This can truly be a window for the next generation to look back in the past.
> As a movie geek I'm personally offended when someone says "oh, it's from 2017, it's an old movie!", or "I don't want to see anything from 90s, yuck" - and that's pretty common.
Now I feel old. I was thinking you might say 1960 or something.
I recently had a chat with a collegue who never heard of Quake.
He also never watched Lock, Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels.
And Half-life is just something-something-let-me-check.
Oh, well...
90% of the PS2’s floating point throughput is in the two vector units, not the R5900 conducting them. Concentrating on that, as the article does, seems as futile as focussing on the 68000 rather than the Amiga PAD in a 16-bit context (ignoring the EE’s 16-bit RAMBUS bottleneck).
However that approach will probably suit the least-ambitious PC-ports to PS2 (by studios that didn’t appreciate the difference) - rather as an ST emulator was a short cut to run the simplest Amiga games.
Hey! I can speak here.
Back in the day, I wrote a simulator for the PS2’s vector units because Sony did not furnish any debugger for them. A month after I got it working, a Sony 2nd party studio made their VU debugger available to everyone… Anyway…
The good news is that the VU processors are actually quite simple as far as processors go. Powerful. Complicated to use. But, not complicated to specify.
This is made much simpler by the fact that the only documentation Sony provided was written by the Japanese hardware engineers. It laid out the bit-by-bit details of the instruction set. And, the bitwise inputs, outputs, delays and side effects of each instruction.
No guidance on how to use it. But, awesome docs for writing a simulator (or recompiler).
I think you're actually describing why recompilation is interesting here rather than why it's futile
An application of the first Futamura projection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation
I read this as Futurama way too many times
So did I. Considering there is a PS2 Futurama game, it seems a reasonable mistake.
honestly I kept thinking of this https://theinfosphere.org/Futurama_theorem
Could be worse
Is it? It would be if it partially evaluated a MIPS emulator on a particular game. But it doesn't seem to work like that.
"Decoding the MIPS R5900 instructions in each function Translating those instructions to equivalent C++ code Generating a runtime that can execute the recompiled code The translated code is very literal, with each MIPS instruction mapping to a C++ operation." It sounds like a MIPS interpreter that gets statically unrolled.
Yes, it's like the result of unrolling a MIPS interpreter, but there never was an actual MIPS interpreter.
I thought the point of the Futamura projection was that there was actually partial evaluation happening, i.e. you take a real interpreter and specialize it in some automated fashion. That's what makes it interesting.
But I could well be wrong about the naming. It doesn't really matter what it's called if we're all clear about what's actually happening.
Emulation is already amazing. What can be done with recompilation is magic: https://github.com/Zelda64Recomp/Zelda64Recomp
So… What’s the magic? (In theory, interpretation/emulation and compilation should produce identical behavior.)
The magic is that now you can modify the source code of the game and recompile that.
Folks have been optimizing SuperMario64 to run much faster on actual N64 hardware. And, there is a project that has ported it to run on the PlayStation 1. That’s much weaker hardware that has no hope of emulating the N64.
Identical behavior, sure, but much less overhead and fewer restrictions on e.g. resolution than you'd get on a general purpose emulator
I wonder how they will tackle the infamous non-conformant Ps2 floating-point behavior issue, that is the biggest hurdle on emulating Ps2.
PS2 floating-point behavior is one of the few hardware misfeatures so awful it affects emulation of competing systems[0]. The game True Crime: New York City is so dependent on PS2 floating point that the GameCube port installs an error handler just to make 1/0 = 0. Which isn't even PS2 hardware behavior. But it is "close enough" that the game does not immediately throw you into the void every time you step on a physics object.
[0] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2021/11/13/dolphin-progress-rep...
Some context for others who were unaware: https://github.com/PSI-Rockin/DobieStation/issues/51
EDIT here's potentially a better link: https://www.gregorygaines.com/blog/emulating-ps2-floating-po...
As of now, it looks like they're ignoring it:
https://github.com/ran-j/PS2Recomp/blob/91678d19778891b4df85...
#define FPU_ADD_S(a, b) ((float)(a) + (float)(b))
But if you wanted to handle it, you'd presumably macro expand the floating point operations to something that matches the PS2 fpu (or comes closer).
Probably the same way as the emulator themselves, with a list of titles needing the real PS2 floating point.
A lot of titles don't actually need it and work fine with standard IEEE floating point.
I hope the steam machine 2.0 can be a good target for developers for years to come like the ps2 was
As far as I know, static recompilation is thwarted by self modifying code (primarily JITs) and the ability to jump to arbitrary code locations at runtime.
The latter means that even in the absence of a JIT, you would need to achieve 100% code coverage (akin to unit testing or fuzzing) to perform static recompilation, otherwise you need to compile code at runtime at which point you're back to state of the art emulation with a JIT. The only real downside of JITs is the added latency similar to the lag induced by shader compilation, but this could be addressed by having a smart code cache instead. That code cache realistically only needs to store a trace of potential starting locations, then the JIT can compile the code before starting the game.
Yes, but in practice that isn't a problem. People do write self modifying code, and jump to random places today. However it is much less common today than in the past. IT is safe to say that most games are developed and run on the developers PC and then ported to the target system. If they know the target system they will make sure it works on the system from day one, but most developers are going to prefer to run their latest changes on their current system over sending it to the target system. If you really need to take advantage of the hardware you can't do this, but most games don't.
Many games are written in a high level language (like C...) which doesn't give you easy access to self modifying code. (even higher level languages like python do, but they are not compiled and so not part of this discussion). Likewise, jumping to arbitrary code is limited to function calls for most programmers.
Many games just run on a game engine, and the game engine is something we can port or rewrite to other systems and then enable running the game.
Be careful of the above: most games don't become popular. It is likely the "big ticket games" people are most interested in emulating had the development budget and need to take advantage of the hardware in the hard ways. That is the small minority of exceptions are the ones we care about the most.
This is PS2 emulation, where most engines were still bespoke and every hack in the book was still on the table.
JIT isn't _that_ common in games (although it is certainly present in some, even from the PS2 era), but self-modifying or even self-referencing executables were a quite common memory saving trick that lingered into the PS2 era - binaries that would swap different parts in and out of disk were quite common, and some developers kept using really old school space-saving tricks like reusing partial functions as code gadgets, although this was dying out by the PS2 era.
Emulation actually got easier after around the PS2 era because hardware got a little closer to commodity and console makers realized they would need to emulate their own consoles in the future and banned things like self-modifying code as policy (AFAIK, the PowerPC code segment on both PS3 and Xbox 360 is mapped read only; although I think SPE code could technically self-modify I'm not sure this was widespread)
The fundamental challenges in this style of recompilation are mostly offset jump tables and virtual dispatch / function pointer passing; this is usually handled with some kind of static analysis fixup pass to deal with jump tables and some kind of function boundary detection + symbol table to deal with virtual dispatch.
How many PS2-era games used JIT? I would be surprised if there were many of them - most games for the console were released between 2000 and 2006. JIT was still considered a fairly advanced and uncommon technology at the time.
A lot of PS2-era games unfortunately used various self-modifying executable tricks to swap code in and out of memory; Naughty Dog games are notorious for this. This got easier in the Xbox 360 and PS3 era where the vendors started banning self-modifying code as a matter of policy, probably because they recognized that they would need to emulate their own consoles in the future.
The PS2 is one of the most deeply cursed game console architectures (VU1 -> GS pipeline, VU1 microcode, use of the PS1 processor as IOP, etc) so it will be interesting to see how far this gets.
Ah - so, not full-on runtime code generation, just runtime loading (with some associated code-mangling operations like applying relocations). That seems considerably more manageable than what I was thinking at first.
Yeah, at least in the case of most Naughty Dog games the main ELF binary is in itself a little binary format loader that fixes up and relocates proprietary binaries (compiled GOAL LISP) as they are streamed in by the IOP. It would probably be a bit pointless to recompile Naughty Dog games this way anyway though; since the GOAL compiler didn’t do a lot of optimization, the original code can be recovered fairly effectively (OpenGOAL) and recompiled from that source.
I'd say practically none, we were quite memory starved most of the time and even regular scripting engines were a hard sell at times (perhaps more so due to GC rather than interpretation performance).
Games on PS2 were C or C++ with some VU code (asm or some specialized hll) for most parts, often Lua(due to low memory usage) or similar scripting added for minor parts with bindings to native C/C++ functions.
"Normal" self-modifying code went out of favour a few years earlier in the early-mid 90s, and was perhaps more useful on CPU's like the 6502s or X86's that had few registers so adjusting constants directly into inner-loops was useful (The PS2 MIPS cpu has plenty of registers, so no need for that).
However by the mid/late 90s CPU's like the PPro already added penalties for self-modifying code so it was already frowned on, also PS2 era games already often ran with PC-versions side-by-side so you didn't want more than needed platform dependencies.
Most PS2 performance tuning we did was around resources/memory, VU and helped by DMA-chains.
Self modifying code might've been used for copy-protection but that's another issue.
I believe the main interest in recompilation is in using the recompiled source code as a base for modifications.
Otherwise, yeah, a normal emulator JIT basically points a recompiler at each jump target encountered at runtime, which avoids the static analysis problem. AFAIK translating small basic blocks and not the largest reachable set is actually desirable since you want frequent "stopping points" to support pausing, evaluating interrupts, save states, that kind of stuff, which you'd normally lose with a static recompiler.
[dead]
See also: XenonRecomp, which does the same thing for Xbox 360, and N64:Recompiled which does the same thing for N64.
Note that this "recompilation" and the "decompilation" projects like the famous Super Mario 64 one are almost orthogonal approaches in a way that the article failed to understand; this approach turns the assembly into C++ macros and then compiles the C++ (so basically using the C++ compiler as a macro re-assembler / emulation recompiler in a very weird way). The famous Super Mario 64 decompilation (and openrct and so on) use the output from an actual decompiler which attempts to reconstruct C from assembly, and then modify that code accordingly (basically, converting the game's object code back into some semblance of its source code, which this approach does NOT do).
Even with tooling isn't this kind of effort going to be enormously complicated, because, as I understand it, so many aspects of the behaviour of 8-bit and console games relied on all sorts of clever techniques, timing quirks and other side effects.
Won't it be very difficult for the recompilation process or the dev to recognise when these are being relied on and to match the key behaviour?
Or is the idea to pull out the basics of the game structure in a form that runs on modern hardware, then the dev fleshes out the missing parts.
From the last time I looked at these recompilation projects, they take the assembly and basically convert each opcode back into an llvm instruction and then recompiled from there. This comes with a lot of caveats though, last time I looked at it we still needed a function map of some kind to tell us where all the functions are and you still needed to replace chunks of the generated code afterwards for things like rendering, sound, controller input, and just about anything that would interact with the world outside of the cpu.
Edit: After some reading on the github page, it seems they are translating it to c++ instead of using llvm directly, but the original idea still holds. They aren't decompiling it to c++ that looks like original source code, it more like they're converting it to c++ that emulates the processor and gets statically compiled.
So it's not really just a drop and go replacement like it sounds like it'd be, but it has so far enabled the recompilation of multiple n64 games. This seems like an extension into the ps2 space.
Side note: The ps2 is a 32bit console with a 64bit alu (and some 128bit simd)[1]. So a lot of the weird tricks from the 8bit days weren't really used here. Not that there aren't weird tricks, just things like using undocumented instructions and racing the beam are less prevalent. I could be wrong here, I was growing up at this time not making games. All of this is just from research I've done in the past. Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2_technical_specif...
I suspect many PS2 games were mostly written in C or C++, which greatly simplifies things. Games that used the interface libraries from Sony for e.g. managing input will greatly simplify things as well.
One notable exception is the Jak and Daxter games, which were written in GOAL[1], but have their own recompilation project.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp
I think these kind of things will bring problems.
Because Nint€ndo or $ony (and others game companies) have a big problem, their old games are awesome and if the people can play these games, then the people will be happy and will not need new games or new sagas.
Because the problem is not the people playing old games, the real problem is the people will not pay for new games
And we know that these companies have army of lawyers (and "envelopes" to distribute among politicians) to change the laws and make illegal something that is not illegal.
I have very little sympathy for these companies. They make access to these titles difficult if not impossible. Preservation matters and they have no interest in anything but the bottom line today.
It’s interesting, because they could potentially make millions, if not billions by selling access to them as a subscription.
I have a samurai game, Kengo 3, that I really liked on PS2. I still have that CD at my parents'. Can anyone recommend me a PS2 emulator?
If you have a Mac aethersx2 it works great on Apple silicon
One thing I never understood on these recompilation projects is how static recomp translates the graphics between radically different architectures. Even with the supporting libraries, this translation shouldn't "just work"
This sounds very cool, but I can practically hear the IP lawyers sharpening their buzz-axes...
They haven't been all that aggressive against the decompile/recompile projects, interestingly. They're sometimes/often set up so you need the original to grab assets etc., but that code is copyrighted too and I'd have to imagine a decompile that purposely compiles to an identical binary would be a derivative work.
My best guess is that for them it's not worth the hassle or any possibility of a negative result in court as long as people have to jump through some hoops by providing an original, and for the projects that don't do that, you have very straightforward easy infringement cases without even getting into the decomp stuff. Though really even ROMs seem to be tacitly tolerated to some extent lately. Maybe there's an attitude that keeping people involved with the franchise is worth it, again so long as it doesn't become too easy.
Sony have actually been fairly chill about emulators etc. so I'd be surprised if lawyers got involved here.
They actually used an open source Playstation emulator when they released the "Playstation Classic" in 2018.
Or as in cartoons, IP lawyers with dollar symbols in their eyes.
Only in terms of their own salaries and bonuses. For all their litigiousness over emulation I can't imagine it really makes them money.
Do IP cases ever make anyone other than outside counsel money?
Sony is not Nintendo.
I know Nintendo is historically very litigious, but the various decomp and recomp projects seem to be doing fine…
Interesting. There was a similar project that did this for JVM bytecode. Xmlvm iirc.
I’ve been meaning to start decompiling one of my favorite games of the era (Hulk Ultimate Destruction) after watching the decomp of other games. Perhaps this is a sign to start?
This is amazing for preservation. Being able to run these classics on modern hardware with native recompilation is a huge step forward.
My all time favorite console. I keep coming back to it. This to me is a fantastic way to preserve gaming history.
N64 as I understand it has some self rewriting code that makes this hard
N64 is the one leading the way on recompilation Mario 64, Perfect Dark, Zelda, Mario Kart etc etc have all been done
[dead]
I've been working on decompiling Dance Central 3 with AI and it's been insane. It's an Xbox 360 game that leverages the Kinect to track your body as your dance. It's a great game, but even with an emulator, it's still dependent on the Kinect hardware which is proprietary and has limited supply.
Fortunately, a Debug build of this game was found on a dev unit (somehow), and that build does _not_ have crazy optimizations in place (Link-time Optimization) that make this feat impossible.
I am not somebody that is deep on low level assembly, but I love this game (and Rock Band 3 which uses the same engine), and I was curious to see how far I could get by building AI tools to help with this. A project of this magnitude is ... a gargantuan task. Maybe 50k hours of human effort? Could be 100k? Hard to say.
Anyway, I've been able to make significant progress by building tools for Claude Code to use and just letting Haiku rip. Honestly, it blows me away. Here is an example that is 100% decompiled now (they compile to the exact same code as in the binary the devs shipped).
https://github.com/freeqaz/dc3-decomp/blob/test-objdiff-work...
My branch has added over 1k functions now and worked on them[0]. Some is slop, but I wrote a skill that's been able to get the code quite decent with another pass. I even implemented vmx128 (custom 360-specific CPU instructions) into Ghidra and m2c to allow it to decompile more code. Blows my mind that this is possible with just hours of effort now!
Anybody else played with this?
0: https://github.com/freeqaz/dc3-decomp/tree/test-objdiff-work...
What makes this exciting isn't just "PS2 games on PC", we already have that via PCSX2. The big deal is moving from emulation to reconstruction
Whats the best PS2 game of all time?
According to https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/ps2/, it's a tie between Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and GTA 3. But it's a subjective question with a subjective answer.
Mildly surprised to see critical darling Shadow of the Colossus as low as position 40 (though at 91/100 not a bad rating).
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was my favorite, still is. Good story, and we are not to far off of having mechs controlling data flow with how Boston Dynamics is doing.
[dead]
Side note, are we at the level where tech blogs and news site can't even write <a href> links properly?
2 out of 4 links in the article are messed up, that's mind boggling... On a tech blog!
Is that how far deep we've sunk to assert it wasn't written by AI?
A more accurate version of the famous idiom:
Those who can, do (and sometimes become teachers when they get older). Those who can’t become journalists.
> (a) happened with a hypothetical hardware platform released after the PS2 but before the PS3, with specs lying in between the two
I would argue strongly that the weak hardware is why the PS2, and other old consoles, were so good, and that by improving the hardware you cannot replicate what they accomplished (which is why, indeed, newer consoles have never managed to be as iconic as older consoles). You can make an equally strong case that the Super Famicom is the best console of all time, with dozens of 10/10 games that stand the test of time. I think the limitations of the hardware played a pivotal role in both, as they demanded good stylistic decisions to create aesthetically appealing games with limited resources, and demanded a significant level of work into curating and optimizing the game design, because every aspect of the game consumed limited resources and therefore bad ideas had to be culled, leaving a well-polished remainder of the best ideas in a sort of Darwinian sense.
> (b) resulted in a sort of standardization in the industry like what happened to the IBM PC and its market of clones, with other vendors continuing to manufacture semi-compatible units
Unlike the PC market, the comprehensive list of "other vendors" is two entries long. Is it a more perfect world if Nintendo manufactures knockoff Playstations instead of its variety of unique consoles? I don't think so.
I love retro consoles as much as the next middle aged software developer, but realistically, the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children. Every console generation is that special generation for one group of kids.
I do agree that sometimes limitations breed creativity, but that’s not the only thing that can make the magic work.
I know it's easy to trot out "nostalgia", but do you not think it's possible that older games can genuinely be better than newer games? I very much think it is common to find such games, even games I had never played in my youth. There were bad games then too, of course, and good games now, but I think the ratio of hits was higher. Particularly now that modern game development is so sloppy. Microtransaction-infested games rule the world, and while the indie scene does still produce excellent gems, most of them tend to be significantly less polished and rougher around the edges.
The difference between microtransaction today and trash in the past is that the old games achieved success by not being trash. Yes trash existed but it was generally not successful and the market generally rewarded quality so the money and dev effort went into quality games. Today the money is made by gacha games so that's where the effort goes. Not the same imo.
That's not entirely untrue. Triple A is the current day shovelware. It's just that the shovel is made of gold and expensive.
I find my enjoyment in select retro games and indies nowadays. When I find a game I really like that is not an indie, it is typically something that is explicitly not AAA (such as Octopath Traveler).
Hell, one of my all-time favorites is a indie I olayed a couple of years ago - Ender Lilies. It became the best Metroidvania ever for me, when I thought nothing would ever dethrone Castlevania Aria of Sorrow.
So yeah. If gaming has a future for me, it is with indies.
I really didn’t expect to get a new favourite game of all time in my 30s, surely the nostalgia factor was too strong, but Outer Wilds was exactly that for me.
1) Anyone who says Celeste’s music is better than Super Mario Bros’ is a liar, and I don’t even like Nintendo games. 2) Let’s look at some of those release dates, shall we? 2019, 2013, 2020, 2017, 2017, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2016, 2013, 2013, 2008(!), 2019, 2021, and 2016.
That’s a period of 15 years. For an American, the NES released in 1985 and the PS2 released in 2000, also a period of 15 years. The fact that your “games of today” list is kind-of competing with four console generations itself is an indication that quality isn’t higher now, even with a considerably higher volume of releases.
Also only two of those games came out in the last 5 years, so things really aren’t looking great for modern games.
> a game like Celeste is objectively better in each and every aspect
As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding.
[dead]
I played Yoshi's island as an adult and think it's the best platformer game. I wonder if it counts as nostalgia.
IMV Super Monkey Ball on the GameCube is way better than any of it's successors
>the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children
if you spend some time on youtube and look at people too young to even have been around play through those games it just becomes evident very quickly how wrong that assessment is. There's an energy even among young audiences when they're playing games like Metal Gear Solid 1&2 for the first time that you hardly see for anything coming out today.
There was a level of artistic talent in that generation, also in animation of the time, that simply doesn't really have a parallel today and brushing it off as nostalgia has a lot to do with he inability of people to recognize that there's no linear progress in art. Talent can be lost, some periods are better than others, just having more cpu and gpu cycles available does not produce better art.
The fact that almost 30 years after games like MGS it's still Kojima and a lot of Japanese guys now with increasingly gray hair who end up getting a lot of awards and pushing the envelope that should tell you something.
I think people forget there were a ton of shit SNES/PSX/whatever games. I personally have a soft spot for the 16 bit era but there are plenty of indie games coming out that are just as beautiful and creative. There's also way more exploration with narrative structure now then there was back then.
yes but it's important to note they're indie games, on the periphery of the culture for a reason. Animal Well is an explicit 16bit scanlines retro game. The first game that comes to your mind is one harkening back to the aesthetic of the 90s. In 1998 you had, and this is of the top of my head: MGS, Starcraft, Thief, Half Life, Baldurs Gate, Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil, Xenogears, Unreal and I'm probably forgetting some all in the same year.
That's not just games but entire modes of expressions and genres being invented. So successful the industry is still occupied with reproducing those franchises, not inventing new ones.
Animal Well was great, but it's also so exceptional now, like Expedition 33, that people frantically celebrate each AA title in an otherwise extremely bleak culture.
I disagree.
I routinely revisit old games with a critical mind. It is an interesting thing to do.
I find that quite a few games I really loved as a kid are special because I played during a formative age, yes. Some are better left in the past.
But I find some that still manage to impress me to this day. They are not good only as a memory, they are just really good.
And a second counter is that my all-time favorite consoles are the SNES and the Switch. I have been gaming ever since the Atari 2600 days. The Switch was released well into my 30s. I have no nostalgia for it.
Ahh ok. My bad, I really misunderstood your point then.
To expand on it, to not let the thread go to waste - I think there is value in nostalgia, we should not ignore our past, it makes who we are. But it is important to recognize when something is good only for nostalgia.
For example, I adore the original Phantasy Star. It was the first RPG I played and to this day I remember my absolute awe in exploring an open world. One of the first things I did there was to walk along a narrow path in between some mountains and the ocean, only to be slaughtered by a group of spiders way too strong for me. It was amazing. Getting out into the world, exploring caves, it felt like an adventure. And later getting into an starship and exploring other worlds. Alis Landale is to this day my spirit animal - When I am given the option to create a character I often make a girl with auburn hair and name her Alis.
I came back to this game twice in the past years - once playing it on Emulator with an improvement patch, another on the Switch re-release. I still had fun printing grid paper and drawing maps on my own, going into a 4 level cave to get to a cake shop, etc. But I recognize it is pure nostalgia. Recommending that game should only be done in a "if you want to see an early stage 8-bit RPG, you can do a lot worse than Phantasy Star". When I play a new RPG I am chasing the same rush my 8 year old self had when playing that for the first time.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have a lot of trouble nowadays to engage with modern "blockbuster" games, or triple-A if you want to call it that. Even darlings such as Elden Ring or BG3 failed to grab me. In current times, I do find my rush typically on Indies, or at most lower spec games when made by giant publishers. It is no coincidence that I still enjoy Nintendo games, I suppose.
Maybe I am just getting old and jaded lol.
Will people ever be nostalgic for the xbox one? For the iphone 14?
I doubt it. These products might even be good, but they are not like their early ancestors in several significant ways that will have them relegated to the footnotes of history. Most importantly, they are difficult to distinguish from both their immediate predecessors and their immediate successors. I don't mean to say that people won't have treasured experiences from this time that they long for in 20 years, just that I doubt the console will play as significant of a role in the memory.
Maybe not xbox one, but I was talking to younger folks about how I'd play mario kart for hours and hours...
They didn't associate but then told me their own anecdotes with the Dreamcast. So my experience matches OPs, its the time/place more than the console.
I got an Xbox One in college. One thing that it had that I'm surprised my PS5 doesn't have was split screen functionality. You could play a game and watch TV (or do whatever else) at the same time. I never touched an XSX so I can't attest if it has something similar, but the concept was pretty neat.
I wouldn't say I'm nostalgic for the X1, but it was a good piece of hardware.
Just for the joke, I own the og Xbox One and it’s the only console I hated from day one.
I clearly remember plugging it to my TV with excitement and being greeted with gigabytes of mandatory updates. And then I discovered that you weren’t able to play the game from the disk and that you need to install it on the fucking hard drive !! And then I discovered that the disc reader was actually slower than my fiber connection which means it was faster to play a game from the online store than installing it from a real disk.
I think I had to wait for at least a full hour just to play my first game.
And on top of that the performance was actually not that good. 30fps everywhere, it was worse than the Nintendo games on Wii / GameCube which usually ran at 50/60fps.
I still own this shit but I never liked it. At least it was useful some month ago when I had to update my Xbox controller firmware (but since I didn’t power it on for years , I also had to wait for updates :) ).
I belong to the 8 and 16 bit home computers generation, which grew along those consoles, yet for those on my circle consoles weren't special, home computers were.
Hence why I find funny the remarks of "PC gaming" is growing, for my crowd it was always there since the 1990's.
NES games are accessible :3
Also 2-player games.
Not really, because as anyone old enough to have played games with 48 KB, that were quite additive, the gameplay is what matters, not GB for textures.
Carrying PC to LAN parties at friend's places? :)
I join my voice in disgreeing with this. While some games can indeed be rose-tinted (I have fond memory of that Game Boy Spiderman game, and it's a terrible shoverware game), many of them are traiblazer (like, invented a genre) or are still standing on their own very well.
I feel as though this reply doesn't really address what is being said in the prior post at all. Yes, bad old games exist. But there were literally dozens of genre-defining games that would go on to shape how games continued to be made in the decades since. Somebody posted a list of indie titles they consider good and probably half of them are outright homages to these older games. Games that are so good they define or reshape genres are few and far between nowadays. They do exist (Vampire Survivors was mentioned, and it is one), but not anywhere near the rate they used to.
>the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children.
If that were the case, we would only really love the games we grew up with. I stayed at an air bnb that had a ps2. I sat down and played ace air combat; a game I'd never touched on a console I'd never had as a child, and I had a blast.
I also recently picked up fallout 1/2 for a couple bucks on steam, and while the controls and graphics weren't great, I still enjoyed the game even though I never touched it in childhood.
Realistically, there are a few games for the xbox / ps2 era where the graphics really have not aged well, but for the most part I am not a pixel snob, at all.
> If that were the case, we would only really love the games we grew up with.
I’m not sure that’s true? Like, perhaps the preference might generalize from the several games one did play as a child to other games which are similar to the ones one played as a child, with the preference still being a result of which games one played as a child.
Sure, I didn’t say all old games are bad, we just have to be aware of nostalgia as a factor. It’s difficult for a game to match the ocarina of time for me, because I had simply never experienced something like that. As an adult I recognize that it is a good game, but also that someone who wasn’t there at the time isn’t going to see what I see in it.
This might be a nitpick, but I could probably only count 5-10 SNES games that would be considered 10/10 IMO, and not many that I think are worth sinking decent time into these days, compared to something like Burnout Revenge - a great game but certainly not a 10/10 game.
Still, I do find the SNES library, and 16bit games in general, quite astounding from a creative and artistic perspective, but not so much from a player’s perspective.
A Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Kirby Super Star, Donkey Kong Country 1-3, Super Metroid, Megaman X series, Dragon Quest series, Final Fantasy series, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound... just off the top of my head, are all very much worth playing today.
There is indeed a very strong and deep library of JRPGs to recommend, but I strongly disagree that DQ is not among the best. I recently replayed two of them in the past two years and both were still 10/10 experiences for me. They are conservative, sure, but that's not a bad thing. One of the points I was making about limited hardware is that polished simplicity can trump overeager complexity, and I think the DQ games are a shining example of that.
As a SoM fan I'd hesitate to give it 11/10, mostly due to how the optimal strat for an action game is how you menu through spells, interrupting combat flow.
> This might be a nitpick, but I could probably only count 5-10 SNES games that would be considered 10/10 IMO firstly, this seems like a pretty flawed standard for evaluating a consoles library, no? but secondly, "5-10 10/10"s seems like a pretty good amount for any consoles library anyways, unless you value a "10/10" less than i guess i would
I’m not criticizing the library of SNES. I have very fond memories playing SNES games. It was more in response to the statement that there are dozens of 10/10 games on SNES. Let me clarify, there are not many 10/10 games on SNES (or any system for that matter), let alone dozens.
Between JRPG's, plataformers, SMK and Top Gears you can sum more than 20.
> Unlike the PC market, the comprehensive list of "other vendors" is two entries long
Before there was “a sort of standardization in the industry” the comprehensive list of “PC vendors” was one entry long.
Years before that, there were several times there was “a sort of standardization in the industry”, both of which led to there being many vendors.
- the Altair bus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus#IEEE-696_Standard: “In May 1978, George Morrow and Howard Fullmer published a "Proposed Standard for the S-100 Bus" noting that 150 vendors were already supplying products for the S-100 Bus”
- CP/M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M#Derivatives: “CP/M eventually became the de facto standard and the dominant operating system for microcomputers, in combination with the S-100 bus computers. This computer platform was widely used in business through the late 1970s and into the mid-1980s.”
This reminded me of the following quote "Limitation breeds creativity", and therefore the PS2's limitations where instrumental to it's success.
The PS2 in may ways was a great improvement on the PS1 however it was not easy to develop for and could do certain things very well, other things not so well. One example is the graphics due to the unusual architecture of the Emotion Engine (gpu). I think this forced the developers to consider what their games really required and where they wanted to spend the development effort, one of the key ingredients for good game design.
Additionally the release hype of the PS2 was quite big and the graphics that where achievable where very good at the time, so developers wanted to go through the development pains to create a game for this console.
Not to forget besides the mountain of great titles for the PS2 there is also a mountain of flopped games that faded into obscurity.
> and at one point was positioned by Sony not just as an entertainment appliance but as a personal computer with their own official PS2 Linux distribution.
to avoid EU import taxes
As owner of PS2 Linux distribution and related hardware, it was sort of ok.
Sony intended it to be the evolution of Playstation Yaroze, fostering indie development, instead people used it mostly to run emulators on the PS2, hence why the PS3 version lost access to accelerated hardware for graphics.
PS2 Linux had hardware acceleration, the only difference was that the OpenGL inspired API did not expose all the capabilities of a regular DevKit.
Community proved that the development effort wasn't worth it.
The XBox arcade and ID@XBox programs have also taken these lessons into account, which is why you only see everyone running emulators on rooted XBoxes, not the developer mode ones.
The market of IBM PC clones only happened because of an IBM mistake, that was never supposed to happen, and IBM tried with the PS2 / MCA to take their control back, but the Pandora box was already open, and Compaq was clever with the way they did reverse engineer the BIOS.
> featured a DVD drive
Wasn't it also among the cheapest DVD players on the market back then?
Yes, it was like the same price (close enough) as a regular Sony DVD player, which was nuts.
There were cheaper off-brand DVD players, of course.
You did have to buy a remote separately, though, unless you wanted to use the game controller (which had a cord).
Back then, unless you were using a projector, the screens weren't that big so we seated clother to the screens.
Besides there isn't that much operation you need to do with a DVD. Appart from volume control (which was set on the TV/speaker system command), you would just need a pause when you wanted to go for a pee so no big deal to only have the corded controller.
Ironically, what you're describing is kind of happening now, just in software
it was a dreadful, useless computer, even then
Unlike the PS3 which the US Air Force bought 1,760 and clustered into the 33rd most powerful** at the time.
(**Distributed computing is very cheat-y compared to a "real" supercomputer which has insane RDMA capabilities)
We had clusters of them in university too.
If all you needed to do was vector math, a dedicated vector processor with eight cores that are capable of running as fast as the extremely wide bus could feed them with data is the way to do it. You couldn't buy anything close to it's capabilities (for that specific task) for the money.
I remember the course we used them in being hard as hell, and the professor didn't really have any projects prepared that would really push the system.
From what I understand (may be wrong) this is exactly the reason that they stopped allowing Linux installs on PS3s.
People were buying them just for this purpose. However, the consoles were sold at a discount because Sony expected users to buy games, controllers, etc. If someone bought a PS3 alone, without anything else then Sony lost money.
It coincidentally happened around the time this came out.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110106074158/http://psx-scene....
Then they sued him. There's a bunch of archived links on his Wikipedia page.
"it was a dreadful, useless computer, even then"
So you don't dispute the thesis that the hypothetical general-purpose machine described in the comment would have needed to have been been better than the PS2?