How Games Used to Look: Why Retro Gaming on a CRT Looks Different [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
- The pixels in an LCD aren't little light bulbs. They are little lamp shades. (The pixels in an OLED display are little light bulbs though)
- A CRT doesn't shoot light. It shoots electrons.
- The video makes it seem like pixels in an LCD update all at once. Not true! They're scanned.
- The video makes it seems that there's no temporal bleeding on CRTs. This sounds unlikely to me...
- The main difference in image quality between coaxial and composite inputs is not that coaxial needs to stuff audio and video together. It's that in coaxial the signal is shifted to a carrier frequency as if it came from an antenna (usually channel 3 or 4) so the decoder needs to bring it down to the frequency it uses internally (called the intermediate frequency) before sending it to the screen. This degrades the signal.
There were also a few wrong numbers in this video, such as the idea of a normal CRT refreshing 75 times a second (nope).
And I was expecting some discussion of interlacing, which had a big impact on how pixels and animations appeared on CRTs.
But I agree—it was fun to watch!
Not for 8-bit systems and the vast majority of games on 16-bit systems. AFAIK, all of the 8-bit systems used not-standard video where all frames were odd frames or all frames were even frames, so you got 50/60 Hz progressive video with no interlacing (240p in NTSC, 256p in PAL; both subject to not all systems put meaningful output on all lines). Some 16-bit systems allowed for interlaced modes, but it was rarely used. Fifth generation (N64/PSX/Saturn/etc) made interlacing a lot more common; those systems were more likely to render to a frame buffer and then you can send half the lines in each field and get an increase in vertical detail much easier than getting the same effect working with a sprite engine.
There is, but I don't remember it being noticeable even on cheap TVs, except in high contrast situation where the screen is dim with bright things moving around. I still miss the lack of motion blur that CRTs gave by default.
I found a forum post where someone lists these values:
"Phosphors in current use for CRT-applications:
Red: phosphor = Y2O2S:Eu3+. Lifetime (1/e time) = 150 us, single exponential.
Green: phosphor = Zn2SiO4:Mn2+. Lifetime (1/e time) = 10-15 ms. Clearly, this is quite long and is the limiting factor in increasing frame-frequency.
Note: the emission decay has a highly non-single-exponential decay --> at long times (~1 s) still some emission can be observed by the eye. This can be seen clearly by looking into the green CRT directly after the image was switched off. However, the intensity is too low to cause problems in an active image when the image-frequency is below ~100 Hz.
Blue: phosphor = ZnS:Ag,Cl. Lifetime (1/e time) = ~100-200 us. Note: not single-exponential decay, but no emission at long times.
(Source: Shionoya & Yen, "Phosphor Handbook", 1998.)"
https://www.avsforum.com/threads/what-is-the-rise-and-fall-t...
And in this high framerate video of a CRT you can see the different colors decay at different rates. Here the blue seems to decay the fastest. But they're all imperceptibly dark by the time the scan line comes around again. I have no idea if there's any cumulative effect that's perceptible.
OLEDs without strobing, on the other hand, have a full frame of brightness persistence (and LCDs have slow color changes on top of that).
In this case, the pinnacle of emulation of a CRT is to simulate photon emission in a tube, and simulate the response curve of each phosphor element.
To do that would probably take a supercomputer to effectively calculate real-time.
According to this paper, there are (1.12 x 10^16) photons per second produced by a 1-lumen source over the interval from 400 to 700 nm . And with a 200 nit CRT is roughly 600 lumen... which is roughly (6.7 x 10^18) photons per second... if you just model them as a particle. To take in quantum effects, yeesh.
https://www.imaging.org/common/uploaded%20files/pdfs/Papers/...
I think I felt more immersed in retro games because my brain knew that it's supposed to fill in all these details. With modern games it's close to realistic, but not quite, and my brain doesn't even try to fill in what's missing. It's also more difficult to concentrate on the gameplay when all details are rendered on screen.
I'm also constantly surprised how little graphics matter for an enjoyable experience. A game with amazing graphics blows my mind for 15 minutes. But then I'm used it and I stop caring about visuals altogether, unless they get in my way.
I‘ve noticed that as well. I much prefer say Tomb Raider 2 with its clear edges and flat surfaces to the modern ones with all the foliage and clutter and lighting effects. But I put that down to getting old.
it's not just the visual noise, it's also the inconsistent behavior introduced by those details.
Yes everything being flat boxes was boring looking but I knew exactly what would happen when I tried to shoot through it or bounce a grenade off of it.
Now it's not obvious if that stack of sandbags is actually a single surface and my grenade will bounce off of a gap or if it will go through it. Or if that random bucket I'm shooting at is synced on the server and real or is a local prop.
I've been playing de_dust2 for 20 years.
And in my mind the quality has always felt essentially the same, through CS, CS:Source, CS:GO and now CS2.
Each was a significant rendering upgrade. And I know I could never go back an iteration, but going forward as it has, the game in my mind's eye is just how CS looks and how it's always looked.
I'm the opposite about "retro" gaming though. Having experienced better fidelity and more readable fonts and better sound, I struggle to play games which don't have that, or worse, deliberately choose bad font rendering as a "retro" effect.
It's why one of my favourite games is Factorio, because it's almost the opposite of retro.
Despite being sprite based, it's the cutting edge of modern sprite rendering. The sprites are generated from 3d renders, and you don't find yourself suddenly in 640x480 or crappy fonts out of some nod to the ages.
I remember having a great time playing Rise of the Triad[1], both single player and against my buddy. I was quite good at the time, and often won against my buddy.
Some years ago I fired it up again, and set it to the 320x200 pixels I used to play with, with pixel doubling to get it to about the size of my then ~13" monitor (can't recall except my later 15" was a decent upgrade).
And I couldn't play at all. Anything beyond about 2 feet was just a mess of random pixels. Felt like I had a severe case of myopia.
Yet I also vividly recalled how teenage me would fire rockets at those two pixels over there, killing my buddy...
Why books are often better than their movies.
This has made me really appreciate art direction over raw fidelity. The first party PS5 games are all beautiful, but Horizon Forbidden West was almost difficult to look at because there's just so much detail everywhere, much of it irrelevant. In contrast God of War Ragnarok is just as beautiful, but the art direction is much better suited for the gameplay, so I never had problems with losing important details in the sea of fidelity. Horizon is like blowing out your taste buds on pure sugar.
https://www.dwitter.net/d/12335
Although like the author I feel like the Trinitrons don't look so good. Although this is entirely subjective, I'm pretty sure I grew up on playing games on a "crappy" old shadow mask TV where the colours seem to bleed together better because of the subpixel arrangement that I think makes it blend on the Y axis as well as the X axis.
[edit]
Hah, found my old TV/monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7S_WLrvHW8 Can't figure out if it's a shadow mask or not though.
The MiSTer FPGA does an excellent job with filters to recreate that experience but isn’t 100% there yet. The Analogue Pocket also does a great job recreating the look of GB, GBC, and GBA games. I’m very impressed by the people that have developed these filters and am optimistic about their implementation in the future. I’m not always going to have a CRT, so filters are the next best thing to capturing the original look.
[0] https://www.winstoncooke.com/blog/2023-08-26-appreciating-24...
the shaders may not be perfect yet, but it makes me happy that we have the option.
It's like George Lucas and his Original Vision problem... it's not good to mess with existing art people already love
That's not really a medium known for its sharp edges and fine details.
Using something like a heavier weight (takes more layers), hot press (smoother grain) watercolor that makes it easier to add finer sharper, details. Additionally, there are mixing mediums [2] that allow changing application in different ways and there is masking fluid which helps preserve a sharp edge when working on multiple layers.
There is a variety of media that is "watercolor" as well: watercolor pencils, water soluble pastels, opaque watercolors, watercolor markers, and granulating watercolors.
1: https://doodlewash.com/guest-artist-photorealism-watercolors... 2: https://www.art-is-fun.com/watercolor-mediums
The 4K scan of the film may or may not match the quality of the original film depending on the graininess of the film, but from a 70mm source it will probably be slightly inferior to the film version, however grainy 35mm prints have grains bigger than a 4K pixel, so the transfer is about the same quality.
Someone watching the film on a VCR (or even a DVD) isn't getting anywhere close to the original intended experience. They may still get a lot of the atmosphere from the experience, but it was always a sub-par experience compared to the cinema, and most people who who watched films on a VCR were only too well aware of that as even most commercial VCR tapes weren't up to the standard that was possible for broadcast OTA TV especially for PAL.
In contrast, running a video game designed for NTSC or PAL TV's, usually somwhere between 320 and ~350 horizontal pixels that were then encoded to NTSC or PAL, so keeping the original pixel accuracy on the luma component of the colour, but smudging colours to a lower accuracy in the chroma (each line was ~280 colour clocks, but some of these weren't visible, so maybe estimate 200 pixels horizontally), and finally output to a TV with a different arrangement of pixels again depending on the mask in the TV.
It was pretty much accepted that single pixels wouldn't be the colour they were supposed to be, and many pixel games used dithering to create new colours and colour gradients to make up for limited palettes from the hardware and usually even more limited palettes from the colour look-up tables (because memory was a premium, systems were often 4 colours from a choice of 16 or similar). Even well before the advent of LCD TVs, some games looked a bit ugly when using a higher quality RGB computer monitor (e.g. the 1080 for the Amiga) compared to using a TV, even though the monitor was vastly superior for applications.
To compensate for the relatively low refresh rate of interlaced broadcast TV, the phosphor on the screen was designed to decay in brightness slowly so that the alternate lines would fill in the gaps left from the previous field to give the impression of a higher vertical resolution (this is why NTSC is usually called 480i30 and PAL 576i25) but in practice, most games treated each field individually and depending on the timing of the signal they output, it might not even be actually interlaced at all, so games really ran at 240p60 (NTSC) or 288p50 (PAL) with some blur between frames from the phosphor which wasn't designed for that. As an aside, this is why live TV broadcasts (i.e. using an old TV camera rather than a film scan) look so jaggy on a modern TV - although they are interlaced, the two fields aren't independent when the camera or subjects are moving as the image is captured twice in different positions. This looks OK on a TV, because the phosphor has decayed a bit and the newer image is slightly brighter, but also because the image is effectively blurred across a couple of frames anyway. Later studio cameras in the digital age captured the whole image at once and output a genuine interlaced signal where the odd and even frames were coherent.
When you try to play a game designed for CRT on a modern LCD TV, first of all, you don't get any of the effects mentioned above, you just get a crisp square that fills the entire pixel space. Some TVs allow a "clarity" or "crispness" adjustment that blurs the image a bit, but fundamentally the image is never what was intended originally, nor how it was perceived when seen on a CRT. Attempts to up-scale these low-resolution images to take advantage of the higher-resolution from the LCD can often lead to even weirder artifacts - e.g. you might like an upscaler to recognise a diagonal edge and create a smooth diagonal, but this can lead to weird diamond patterns in dithered areas. And some TVs might also try to de-interlace the image, leading to the jaggies I mentioned above from live TV cameras.
All in all, games from a certain era were designed to look good on the output technology of the time, and modern TVs generally do a terrible job of replicating that experience unless you go through a specialised CRT filter which tries to replicate in software the effect you'd get if you stuck a hi-resolution digital camera in front of an old CRT displaying the signal. Some of these are actually pretty good, but vastly different from what you'd get plugging your old game directly into a TV.
Films were generally designed for watching in the cinema, and were broadcast on TV at a lower quality, and sold on VCR at an even worse quality. Watching a high quality transfer on a blu-ray is much closer to how they were intended to be seen, and not only doesn't create any weird artifacts by being better quality than you'd have seen on your CRT showing a VCR tape, it'll actually reveal new details that were always there in the film that were just missing on the VCR version.
https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587?lan...
Also, issues with pixel aspect ratio (8:7 vs 5:4 vs 4:3, square vs rectangular pixels) can be resolved while still being able to scale by exact integers rather than floats.
It's funny, but 4K displays might really be one of the best ways to play retro games nowadays, I'm hoping that upscalers (like the Retrotink 4K, or maybe future OSSC upgrades) will bring some of the stuff we've been doing in emulators to real hardware as well (though yes, that thing will cost several hundreds of dollars, so emulation is probably going to stay the preferred option for many).
Now we just have to solve losing the sync signal for games that switch between 240p and 480i during gameplay, or that don't have an exact 60 Hz refresh rate - Variable Refresh Rate displays are actually a real opportunity here as well. Oh, and find a way to all of that without introducing any display processing latency.
Another strategy is to delay polling input computing the next frame until the end of the previous frame being drawn (RetroArch frame delay). This does not rely on the game not responding immediately to controller input, but is more prone to dropping frames if your CPU gets occupied and can't run your emulator for a few milliseconds.
It is possible to compute and display images in near-real-time over HDMI, but this technique is quite niche (https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-lagless-raster-follower...).
Sometimes when people complain about a crt being "too dark", what I've found is it's when they have those 100hz/120hz tube lights on, it seems to interfere with them.
The other often-forgotten issue is running 50Hz PAL games smoothly. This should be getting easier, with more screens able to run at 100Hz, but it's rare to see an emulator actually support this.
Would be nice if modern 4:3 panels were available, too (And not just for retro gaming, they were more practical than 16:9 for work PCs)
Yes, that's what happens when you set screen brightness to the lowest setting. And guess what, it looks terrible.
Adding flicker without the motion clarity benefit looks bad. Strobing in sync with content looks amazing. How many people complained about 60 Hz flicker on CRTs over their 70 year reign?
>LCD is comprised of tiny light bulbs: LEDs
No, it's comprised of liquid crystal (LC) units, each of which effectively control how much of the backlight (which may be LCD or CCFL) passes through itself and thus how bright that pixel is. Although I can see why you would think this with the introduction of "LED Monitors" around 2010, which is totally not intentional misrepresentation from the marketers.
>This is way slower than a CRT
LEDs are fast but LCs are indeed slow.
>Even if you could turn it on and off really fast there's a little bit of a fade that's what they call grey to grey
Smearing is not noticable in LCDs made after the early 2000s. There is still motion blue but that's due to no black frame insertion.
>Some pixels in the LCD if they are a similar color will not even change
This is not a known thing, it's made up. That would require storing a frame and anaylzing it against the previous frame although I wouldn't put that above them (and they do this for other reasons once in a while). This sounds like a corruption of spatial/temporal dithering which actually is a thing in most or at least half of LCDs.
>It doesn't draw the entire thing at once like on an LCD
LCDs don't draw all at once, they scan out just like CRTs (some draw all at once but it's pointless and adds (some) input lag).
>The camera is 30 fps and the tv is 30 fps and somehow you see the band go across the screen
It's because the camera has to be synchronized with the TV and have the exposure set up a certain way otherwise it will capture the screen, e.g., half way through the scanout of a frame. Although I'm not sure you can find any CRT or LCD that can go down to 30Hz.
Unfortunately youtube seems to have broken the ability to search only within a channel, so I can't find the exact one I'm thinking about.
Edit: This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAi8AVj9GV8
I think the question should really be: can they do a good enough job?
My take is that with the right display they can.
CRTs didn't have an impossible refresh rate, colour gamut, contrast or resolution - arguably they kind of suck in each of these areas compared to modern displays.
I mean, we didn't see screens show deep teals until OLED arrived.
To get to my point: it is technologically trivial to work with audio compared to video. Audio simulation and reconstruction has been a mostly dead area of research for decades while video is still flourishing. Audio did not stop at the actual technical best place it could have, but when it was good enough and diminishing returns hit.
1. https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/solidstate/assist/pdf/AR-Fl...
But they can't match the motion clarity of a CRT.
My 240hz oled is not as clear as a 120hz or even 60 hz CRT when I put them side by side
Only recently has anything really crossed a threshold of reproduction in software that looks and feels like using a CRT on certain types of displays.
For anyone who has the room for it, just go buy an actual arcade cab with a CRT in it. Then put a Raspberry Pi with a "Pi2JAMMA" (not affiliated with these guys, but I like it) connector in it. You'll have thousands of games and it's basically the real thing (short of very specific cases like the game Tempest that was directly controlling the electron beam).
I'm a happy camper with one vintage arcade cab, which I own since years. A friend of mine saw it and went berzerk: he now has six arcade cabs.
If I wanted to be facetious I'd say it's arguably less work to buy a vintage arcade cab with an actual CRT and put a RPi + Pi2JAMMA adapter in it then try to get a shader working on a modern screen.
If you want the real arcade feeling you need proper arcade joysticks anyway: at that point we're probably already talking about a cab (you could have just the joysticks controller, but it's not as good as the joystick in an arcade cab).
So if you've got a cab, you may as well go with a real one (with a CRT that is) and an adapter that'll drive the CRT (like the Pi2JAMMA one).
As a bonus you'll also be able to put real vintage PCBs in your cab.
Have any recommendations? Buying a PVM is a bit outside my price range.
[0]: https://hackaday.com/2023/08/16/new-motherboard-improves-old...
Maybe this machine just had a really good CRT in it, but the level of intense brightness against the pitch black background was honestly sort of mesmerizing. I had forgotten just how good CRTs were in that regard.
(A little bit off-topic from what the guy in the video is discussing, but I thought it's worth mentioning since it could be another reason why people have such fond memories of CRT gaming.)
https://mrmotarius.itch.io/mrmocrt
(The scuffed paper and cross-stitch filters are very good too.)
To me, a good plasma display offers a lot of what people like about the CRT. Phosphorus glowing in tubes are fast and high contrast. And maybe the micro-LED displays will be similar. Pixels lighting up, are still nicer than trying to block always on bright light.
Those things said, people like the CRT.
One mounted in a cabinet, for example, will deliver a really compelling experience! About the only thing I can see competing is a laser projection of some kind.
Really high refresh, interlaced CRT rasters have a look too. So does higher refresh rate, progressive scanned motion.
Maybe this ends up like vinyl. We have not lost the tech yet. Maybe there will be a return like we have seen for vinyl.
And here is an idea for someone:
Make the shadow mask on glass and enclose it in a vacuum, but not big like we need for an electron gun. Just big enough to enclose the phosphor.
Then, from the rear, excite the phosphor with lasers. Or even a few groups of them to get a full, high speed raster made up of multiple smaller ones all running in parallel. Think 4 rectangular displays stacked together with their longer edges touching.
Doing that keeps the deflection angle down.
And the lasers can be enclosed. But it won't be necessary to pull a high vacuum for the whole thing. Just the thin, front, phosphor portion. And that could be replaced when it gets tired, and or when burned in, or scratched up.
Registration becomes a software problem.
Good displays have .01x inch phosphor dot pitches. Violet light is orders better at 0.000015 inches. Light just outside visible would work great.
The phosphor glass assembly could be recycled or refurbished and relaxed vacuum requirements means avoiding toxic glass.
I bet a display like that would deliver the CRT experience and then some.
Someone go make the thing. I want one.
Or, maybe I hit the lottery! Then I will make my own.
I recently bought a "Metal Slug" art book, and was AGHAST that all of the assets in the art-book were obvious screen caps from an emulator. The assets looked like shit, and I considered the book lazy and crappy because of this.
The game assets were designed on CRT screens with the bleed as part of the aesthetic.
It is amazing to see the difference between assets on a CRT screen vs an LCD screen with no shaders. Do some basic googling if you are interested, it is crazy how much better a low-poly model, or illustration looks. Especially on stuff like the classic King of Fighter and Street Fighter games.
I often wonder if there is room for a single CRT manufacturer in the marketplace. I would switch to CRT if I could buy new, have a warranty, and be reasonably assured I can find a replacement easily if it fails.
Yes I can play them as teenagers used to back in the day: cheap tiny Panasonic CRT and terrible English voice acting. I'm sure for some people that gives them a warm fuzzy nostalgic feeling.
But there's a reason why remakes and remasters are popular.
(I did a brief search and came across graphics libraries and discussions about shaders, but didn't find anything easily downloadable...)
s/a decade/two decades/These aren't generic visual imitations like early Super Eagle or scanline filters. The ones I've been using require a 4K 120HZ OLED for contrast and latency, and to be able to accurately represent how the frames would be rendered over a CRT's pixels. It's pretty wild how good it is.
If you haven't, check the libretro forums for "new-sonkun-crt-guest-advanced-presets-thread". I've only tried with RetroArch for management, but it's not limited to that.
[0]: https://piratehearts.itch.io/supercrt [1]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/crt-simulation-in-...
I want a uniform way to include them in my art
Whether its a CSS transformation or filter for a website
Or an action in photoshop
Or a webgpu thing
Or a standalone emulator
Most of us who grew up playing games were hungry for it - our parents allowed us a fairly limited supply of games, on their budget and schedule, and they probably put limits on when and how long we could play them for, right? Maybe we had to travel to a friend’s house because they were the only one in the neighborhood with a particular game or console. Furthermore, entertainment options in general were limited, and the games offered a genuine novelty that you couldn’t get anywhere else - even the crappy ones. Thus we savored every opportunity to play, and the satisfaction of that hunger is what our nostalgic memories are built on.
Contrast to today, where you can download NES.zip and possess literally every game on that platform, almost instantly. As an adult, you can play as much as you like. But you probably don’t even want to play that much because you’ve also got a universe of streaming TV and movies and media and a back catalog of AAA-games a mile long and VR and gadgets and social media and a million other entertainment options, distractions and responsibilities. We’re not hungry at all - we’re obese from media and stuffed to the gills with it.
For video games my system is not random, but I will go 20 years in the past and play the major releases of that year. So I'm playing Beyond Good & Evil soon and already look forward to Half Life 2 next year. Makes me hyped but without fail because I know the actual release was a hit.
a bad game can be frustrating to play and take 5 times that length at minimum.
Besides, with something like media consumption, having an idiosyncratic system doesn't to my mind present any conceptual issue where it's necessary to interrogate it for consistency, so I'm a bit confused as to what motivates that kind of question.
With movies I didn't want to start in the 30's and watch all kinds of esoteric material that is mostly historically relevant, I just want to be entertained with a movie. Also, with movies it feels more satisfying to watch a classic in between other movies, instead of watching only classic after classic, so that's how I designed that system. With video games, I want all experiences to be very good otherwise I will just stop playing. It's just how I consume it and it's quite personal.
Typically randomness adds an exciting factor to the equation so I prefer it over deterministic systems, but video games are an exception here.
Mario, sonic, hell most sidesrollers. Just because you put 50 hours into the game doesn't mean you'll win. It's why dark souls has a place in my heart. It was a modern game where wining was absolutely not guaranteed. It was hard. And it put you on awe with visuals.
Most games you play nowadays is winnable. And when it isn't people complain why isn't it winnable.
Well... It's why they're not impactful. Do you remember the win you made against a group of 5 year Olds in soccer? Or do you remember the win against friends who were better than you but you played your heart out. That's the difference. Imo
Meanwhile, some of the first games I did beat by myself were Pokemon Silver and Final Fantasy VII. And they both gave me satisfying conclusions to my journey (compared to say, GTA 2, another game I played a lot by myself). And that proceeded to strongly influence the kinds of games I play. not necessarily hard ones, but ones that rewarded my teambuilding (or at least, ability to cheese the mechanics).
Meh. There’s plenty of modern games where “winning” either is not really a thing (Minecraft, Terraria, dwarf fortress) or is fiendishly difficult (“winning” StS would be semi-reliably killing the heart with any character at maximum ascension, I think just reaching A20 in 50 hours would be impressive).
You can always impose artificial constraints to add more time sinks but that’s on you and your ego not the game.
I don't know about Terraria, but only speedrunners consider the end dragon to be the final boss of the game. Besides the fact that the game has received regular updates with new content (and harder challenges/bosses) for more than a decade since the dragon was added, it's a block game...
> unless you just want to build stuff at the endgame
That's like saying "unless you want to build things with lego." Building things is the point, it should go without saying. Beating the dragon is what players do in the first day playing on a new map to clear the way for the real gameplay. It's a prerequisite (not finish line) for getting a full set of equipment so you can start building in earnest. Beating the ender dragon is like getting the box of legos open and poured onto the floor.
My first SNES games, Super Mario World, is a 5 hours long game, 9 if you are going to 100% it https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9387
And I did beat it back then. Not a super complicated game.
What I didn’t remember though and only looked up recently: the MSRP was $60-70 https://imgur.io/khmhfoA
Today that would be like $120-130 for a 5 hours long game https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ But honestly nowadays even $60-70 for a 5 hours long game would be atrocious no matter the nostalgia factor.
Made me think why my parents only bought a game for me three times a year (birthday, christmas, summer vacation)
That is is you have already mastered games. It takes years to get good enough to beat those games in the time those sites says, if you have already spent years playing games then yes you play through those games quickly.
For example, that site lists Super Mario Bros as a 2 hour game. Do you think me as a kid beat that game in 2 hours? No, of course not, I spent hundreds of hours playing it in total and never beat it. At that time games were made arcade hard, they weren't meant for kids to beat, they were meant to provide a long lasting challenge so you can try over and over.
https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9371
Edit:
> And I did beat it back then. Not a super complicated game.
Yes, SNES games were significantly easier than NES games in general. I beat the SNES games earlier than the NES games even though I had the NES games for longer, games becoming easier was a long process and SNES was a step in that direction. There were still SNES games that were hard and few managed to beat, but it wasn't the norm at that point.
We had so much time, though so it wasn't a big deal how hard and tedious a game was. As a bored teenager, dropping 100 hours on a video game in 2-3 weeks was nothing. There was nothing else to do. Trying and failing at a game over and over felt entertaining.
I'm closing in on my 50s, and gaming is just different now. I recently grabbed a NES emulator and a knock-off USB NES gamepad and played through a bunch of old games from my childhood. It hits real different now that I have a life and time is precious.
Games that I remember as fun are now just time consuming and frustrating, rather than entertaining. Platformers where you needed surgical precision to land on just the right brick or you're back to the beginning of the level: irritating and very quickly my brain starts telling me: "This is not worth it." RPGs where you spend most of your time grinding between bosses who (randomly) either kill your party or go down without much of a fight, my brain says: "This is definitely not as entertaining as I remember it." And all the while, I'm watching the clock, thinking about how otherwise productive I could be being right now...
I recently grabbed a NES emulator and a knock-off USB NES
gamepad and played through a bunch of old games from my
childhood. It hits real different now that I have a life
and time is precious.
And all the while, I'm watching the clock, thinking about how
otherwise productive I could be being right now...
The completion times seem generally lower than I expected. I wonder if there is a selection bias, as in most users who submitted stats are people are pretty good at games. Or maybe for classic games, it's recording replay times from people who have already beat it years ago, as opposed to first runs through the game.
(It's the first time I have heard of this site, so I looked up stats for the most recent game I completed, and it said I was 4 times slower than the median and only 3 minutes faster than the slowest time ever. This is true for most games I sampled so I am just bad at games.)
Also tutorials (Pikmin 4 recently put me off again because of that) and way too much in-your-face world building in general… the original Doom had lots of world building but also impeccably thought through gameplay and one manual page that set the scene very simply end effectively. Everything else emerged throughout actual immediacy of game play and the world itself.
Unfortunately not every game can be a Disco Elysium a Cyberpunk 2077 or a Baldur’s Gate 3. No need to waste my time; just be honest about it rather than inflate playtime.
So some of those other games … they could have been good maybe even great 5 hour experiences instead even at “full price”.
Duck hunt was the same thing over and over but you kept playing
There were many games you could pass quickly. You rented those games. You had Romance of the three Kingdom which would take years to pass
What I didn’t remember though and only looked up
recently: the MSRP was $60-70
is a 5 hours long game,
There's no right or wrong way to enjoy a game, so if you are the type to power through a minimal playthrough and never touch it again... cool. No hate. That's your style. I have definitely done that with some games.
On the other hand if I enjoyed a game back then I definitely replayed it multiple times, so "5 hours to completion" definitely did not equal "5 hours of fun" for me and a lot of other people.
9 [hours] if you are going to 100%
Obviously it can be done in 9 hours or even much less with savestates, walkthroughs, playthrough vids, whatever, but that doesn't mean the game only has 9 hours of fun.
My family spent more than a year playing Mario World, exploring, finding secrets.
Nice humblebrag. I put a hundred+ hours into Super Mario Bros when I was a kid and I never finished it. Adults who still play this game today can beat it fast because they have years of practice and the internet/guides for advice, tell them which warps to take, etc.
This is not to say that that is the right way to make a game, but it was to say that playing it was a challenge for young me. Today the only games I find challenging is PvP games, but often times I don't want the other parts of the challenge like the actual people part. This is why some games like Demon's Souls (the first time I ever saw a castle in the distance that I could literally walk up to and smash through, was an awe moment) still stick in my mind.
> Well... It's why they're not impactful.
Today's landscape in of videogame design is much wider than "winnable"/"unwinnable".
There's plenty of "unwinnable" games if one wants nowadays - they're called "hard". There is even the "faithful retro NES" subgenre, which reproduces NES design and difficulty. There are definitely impactful hard games, when well produced (I don't like them, but I guess games like Super Meat Boy have a lot of fans).
There's a reason why, on the other end of the spectrum, there are "easy" games; their objective is to provide an experience rather than a challenge - and also on this side of the spectrum, there is an extreme end - the walking adventures.
Old/unwinnable game of the past doesn't imply "impactful" at all; there was plenty of garbage back then.
There's still plenty of garbage nowadays of course[¹], but there are experience-oriented games that are "impactful" - think of the Bioshock series, or even What Remains of Edith Finch.
There is one aspect of the past that is gone forever, and it's the mystique that some games had for people who couldn't access gaming media.
If, 30+ years ago, one couldn't finish a game (for any reasons), the ending was a mystery. Nowadays, one just looks on Youtube. I have very ambiguous feelings about this, though, as it also carried frustration.
[¹] Although I think that, nowadays, due to the lower bar to production, people with good design skills and poor programming skills, can still produce a remarkable game.
For my children, I insist they watch one movie at once, one show, one game, one book. We don’t start multiple games, or books, until we follow something all the way through.
I have a friend like this—he’s super noncommittal on experiences and events because he’s convinced something better will come along last minute (it rarely, if ever, does). And he ends up missing out—a lot.
If a book/movie/series doesn't work out, then drop it and move on.
Life is too short.
The massive amount of choice available is paralyzing, and after some time they’ve become a lot better at seeing things through.
It sounds like your friend is the exact opposite. He can’t commit because he’s paralyzed by too many options. Eliminate the options and the paralysis disappears.
I can see your point though, I just can't agree with the books part, from my personal experience.
It sucks, there are many other things to read/watch/play, so why not quit the bad stuff and find something better?
This is the coddling the of American mind.
Check the review!
Check the rotten tomato score!
Scour goodreads!
Live fast! Life's short! Indulge in the Good Approved Product!
How about people learn what they like and don't like (and WHY)? How about we stop pushing away negative emotions the second they appear? How about we develop a real identity? You can't grow a personal taste if you only get fed what you instinctively like, you also have to go through the stinkers.
These things tell you if other people like the thing, not if you will like it. There's a keen difference you know, people can have their own opinions on things without taking cues from the crowd.
Anyway, putting down bad books isn't an Americanism. Why do you let Americans live rent free in your mind?
My kids live with me and we often watch and play things together. They’re not holed up in their rooms living sad lives of isolation.
For that reason, we’re never going to watch trash. Gabby’s Dollhouse will never, ever be on any screen in my house. I refuse.
I look at my wishlist on Steam and think "If didn't had a job and could play games for next 20 years I would still not have to settle for average one ever again". Like, compared to 20 years ago I don't ever play anything that by 20 years ago standards would be considered "just okay" or below. We're definitely spoiled
And between indies and sales they are cheap too.
Frankly picking good ones becomes harder, you no longer can count on next <AAA developer> being great as usual and game journalists are incompetent more often than they are useful.
I play AAA games for the narrative now.
On proper gaming, most AAA games are lacking against Slashem, IF, csokoban and casual and libre games like Trigger Rally where the playability it's just there, even if the graphics are two decades behind.
But sometimes at the end of the day when I am tired, I just want to play something mindless and not that challenging.
It is obviously a matter of personal taste and a matter of being lucky or unlucky choosing games, but my experience is very much the opposite. There are (nearly) no good games anymore.
On my end, there are so many options that I tend to look at qualities that I would not even consider twenty years ago, like tone and setting. (Why would I want to play a grim game? Do I really want to play another game set in space?) Quite often, nothing will get past my personal taste filters, even when they are good games.
Go to Steam, search for any genre whatsoever that you're interested in, look at player reviews, and find out why some people think there are no games and why others think we're currently in an unprecedented golden age of gaming. Alternatively, which genres do you like?
But I disagree with the sibling comments in that I'm quite sure it's a fact for a lot of players that there are hardly any good games left in the sense that they have grown and their tastes have reached levels where pretty rehashes of old mechanics and ideas will no longer cut it. AAA games don't innovate much these days, and the indie game with one cool new idea is rarely fun to play because the execution as a whole is so lacking.
To be honest, I think the average HN user does not play games that much. Or watch films, listen to music, read fiction, etc. Which is probably a good thing, but means they have less taste, both in the subjective and objective sense. But go to different internet forums, say 4chan, and you'll find people definitely have huge problems with quality creative content being so rare.
Good things: * Tons of high quality small indie games that experiment with mood, story, genre. Think Cultist Simulator or Factorio.
* Remasters and emulation bring the best of the past to the present.
* New experiments in gaming hardware: Nintendo Switch, Playdate.
* Console play is more ergonomic (controllers, voice chat) than ever.
* Gaming is pretty mainstream now, so there's more people to play with, and there's less stigma.
* Twitch, Discord, YouTube all make finding a community for your game easy and fun (if your game is blessed with a positive one at least).
Bad things:
* Certain genres haven't really seen top-quality entries. After Age of Empires 2, Age of Mythology, and Warcraft 3, the only top-quality entry in the RTS genre was StarCraft 2. We just don't see folks even trying, certainly not with AAA budgets.
* Game design choices make games too streamlined, and remove fun interactions. For RPG games: quest markers, level scaling, lax loot table probabilities, incentivizing solo play til end game, etc.
* Voice acting means there's just less text and less depth. Compare Morrowind to Skyrim. But I think we're over the hump here. A game like RDR2 is fully voice-acted but had 2000 pages of writing. That's the best of both worlds.
* Bad art design makes things look really bad in low-power hardware. Compare D2 and D4 on a lower-end computer.
Deus ex, I really tried hard to like mankind divided but I don't know why I don't.
Wave race 64, even the GameCube sequel didn't capture the magic and every other attempt has rubbish water physics.
1080 snowboarding, the sequel was terrible, I left it back to the shop. No other snowboarding game captures the rewarding control scheme (same with wave race).
Goldeneye, ok perfect dark is good but why has no other game even attempted to capture what makes goldeneye special? It plays like a roller coaster that you can control. (I think someone on a gaming forum said that, I think they are correct).
Quake 3 and unreal tournament 99, no online shooter I've played compares to instagib on these.
This comment is very relevant to the general effect of nostalgia and how it affects our desire to play to these games, and presents another (not contradictory or mutually exclusive) reason why they can sometimes fall flat today. The video focuses on the technical aspect but the economic/life aspect in the comment is equally important.
I watched over half of the video, and while nostalgia is a big focus, it’s a completely different kind of visual nostalgia associated with CRTs, and the very technical differences, down to how CRTs produce smoother motion.
I read the OP and had the same reaction as the parent — this is an interesting observation, but has almost nothing to do with the video.
Do you know that an LCD at 24bpp has the same color quality or even worse as an CRT at 16bpp?
I need my HDR TV to be able to play some old games because the old LCD monitor is crap.
I think having access to any game up to about 2004 has caused me to feel opportunity cost in playing any of them. I remember friends complaining of the same sort of thing once playstation piracy took off. It got to the point were one guy I new would purposely buy real retail games that he wanted to properly play because he knew if he got it on CDR it would be worthless to him and he'd not invest the time in it.
16-year-old me would also be shocked that grown-up me spends more time being physically active than gaming, though interestingly, both are driven by a sense of accomplishment.
Seriously though, I do so love hearing from soi-disant experts about how NES games are objectively better on the grotty, hand-me-down CRT TV they played them on than on today's crisp, high quality LCD or OLED displays. I know because I was there -- we would have given our left nut for that kind of picture sharpness back in the day. In fact I remember transitioning my computer display in the early 2000s from a quite good CRT to one of the earliest non-ghosty LED monitors -- and the increase in sharpness was a significant improvement, less eyestrain. Not to mention the CRT flicker -- annoying to me, possibly seizure-inducing to my sister -- that's largely gone now.
For a long time CRTs did have the advantage of better color reproduction, and they still have the advantage of lower latency. But compared to modern displays they have enough disadvantages that the talk of their objective superiority is mainly nostalgia and copium.
I am nostalgic for consoles hooked up to CRTs. I miss the NTSC color artifacts, the perturbations in the 60Hz hum caused by crosstalk from the CPU or video hardware, the beam racing coding techniques. But I also realize I am spoiled by being able to play all my favorite retro games on a razor-sharp 4K monitor.