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Comment by sleibrock | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of ideas to too wild for one thesis to draw up, but I think there's a lot of good talking points.

* Triple-A games are often-times yearly releases of a series priced at $60 (Battlefield, Call of Duty, FIFA), but are hardly ever new games with new technologies. Most times they last about a year before they're effectively EOL'd.

* Indie games are much lower in comparison and receive more love from their developers

* Nintendo are renowned for their titles and IPs, but their games are far from innovative at times, and their prices are not competitive in the slightest.

* Pricing of modern video games makes players turn to free-to-play games which receive more updates on a regular basis.

* The only way to play classic games reliably is emulation. Getting modern versions of old games from devs/pubs is very unreliable currently (Silent Hill collection, Super Mario 3D Allstars, etc)

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I still think getting into one of these topics in-depth would be more interesting. Like this one:

> Nintendo are renowned for their titles and IPs, but their games are far from innovative at times, and their prices are not competitive in the slightest.

They aren't priced competitively, yet they are incredibly successful (depending on the decade). Could other companies, especially indie devs, price their products similarly? I'm no game dev, but I assume it doesn't feel great to sell your game for $0.99 on Steam.

Honestly emulation is so good now, and games so easy to acquire via torrent communities, that it is kind of difficult for me to justify (to myself) collecting retro hardware. Especially since I end up using Everdrives and ODEs anyway.

I've been seriously considering selling off my collection, but I'm too lazy to do it piecemeal.

I mainly collect retro hardware for the hardware itself. Emulations can play the games, but nothing can emulate how the Game Boy Color perfectly fits on the curve of the N64 (try it), or taking a Dreamcast VMU with you on the go, or the TV tuners that kids like me craved. I love seeing hardware evolve in front of my eyes.

> nothing can emulate how the Game Boy Color perfectly fits on the curve of the N64 (try it)

I did try it, and I think I'm doing something wrong because I can't see how they fit together. Could you expand on this?

The best image I could find: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bjwrb3/how_a_gamebo...

I've got nes, snes, megadrive and a N64 everdrive. I don't use them anymore. I've got a pc under my TV that can handle everything up to GameCube. I can't be bothered dragging out hardware and hooking up an ossc.

No, it's never the same. There will always be glitches.

KiwiFarms murdered the person who could bring emulation within spitting distance of real hardware. So yeah, now there's even more reason to collect gaming hardware.

> No, it's never the same.

You're right, but of course the nature of emulation is that it can actually be better in a lot of ways. More power efficient than original hardware, no cartridges or discs, no composite or NTSC artifacting[0], save states, networked multiplayer, automated translation, etc.

> There will always be glitches.

It is at least theoretically possible to build a perfect emulator. Practically, though, we are already so close that it is more than good enough[1] and fake it for the rest if anyone cares.

> KiwiFarms murdered the person who could bring emulation within spitting distance of real hardware.

Yeah, that was horrible and tragic without even connecting it to emulation and those fuckwits can die and rot in hell.

[0] Ok, that one being better is debatable since the art was designed with that in mind. Of course, there's always shaders.

[1] With the exception of a few systems, like my beloved Saturn.

I think emulation is fine, but it always leaves you guessing a little. Was it really accurate or were you missing something?

I'm intruiged by the fpga emulation stations though. They seem to have the posibility of more accuracy with less latency, but it depends on how good the people making the cores are.

"too wild"? That seems like fairly generic gaming opinions.

(Well, the F2P one seems a bit weird, given the wide range of options of getting games cheap-ish if you don't insist on only playing the newest AAA titles)

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