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Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

I'm mainly just depressed at how slow games are now.

There's an official steam version of the Risk boardgame and it spins my fans like crazy. I used to play versions of Risk in the 2000s that barely registered on my 600mhz, 64mb RAM machine.

I am shocked at how things got so slow. It must take a lot of hard work to make a simple game run slowly on modern hardware.

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I feel like computer versions of board games are done terribly. I don't want a realistic 3d scene with 30 second animations of each move. I want a 2d (maybe basic 3d for some games, but a view of the board, not a first person view) board, with pretty graphics matching the offline version and excellent multiplayer capability for playing my friends online.

We play on boardgame arena and it’s very minimalist but with good online multiplayer. It all runs in your browser and doesn’t do any fancy processing or rendering

I've been playing the digital version of Terraforming Mars recently (as well as the physical copy). I cannot attest to the multiplayer aspect; but the local play against the AI is good and fits your requirements. Worth checking out.

3D can be nice if done well and the animations are good. Monopoly on mobile has good really fast animations and a game can be played in like 30 min against AI. Monopoly on Switch is terrible as you have to watch each literal slow dice roll, piece movement, etc. at normal speed. It takes FOREVER.

Maybe the problem is that it’s much easier to make a game now than it was back then. But as a result people who maybe don’t really know what they are doing can make games using huge tech stack.

> It must take a lot of hard work to make a simple game run slowly on modern hardware.

The arrogance of this comment is wild.

Risk is built with Unity. Unity games are harder to optimize than older custom engines because it's not custom. Unity and UE allowed games that wouldn't normally exist at all to get made. The complaint "I'm mainly just depressed at how slow games are now" is interesting, in that really you're comparing slow games now to games that would never have existed in the first place before.

Personally, I'll take slow games.

Also, as a general rule, games built on licensed content are mostly just a cash grab/pump and dump system.

> Risk is built with Unity. Unity games are harder to optimize than older custom engines because it's not custom. Unity and UE allowed games that wouldn't normally exist at all to get made. The complaint "I'm mainly just depressed at how slow games are now" is interesting, in that really you're comparing slow games now to games that would never have existed in the first place before.

I really don't understand your argument.

It wasn't viable to emulate a 2d board game on a computer before unity?

You don't understand that lowering the barrier to entry has the side effect of lowering general quality? I'm not sure how to explain it more simply.

Probably mining crypto in the background. Or generating analytic data for ads, which is substantially the same thing.

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