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Comment by resters | Hacker News Reader

Making video games fun does not require anywhere near as much hardware as we typically use in modern systems. I look forward to an eventual return to fun video games.

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"Yokoi said 'The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.' He articulated his philosophy of 'Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology' (枯れた技術の水平思考, Kareta Gijutsu no Suihei Shikō) (also translated as 'Lateral Thinking with Seasoned Technology'), in the book Yokoi Gunpei Game House."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Design_philosophy

Nintendo has been doing this ... forever? The switch is ancient tech, and was outdated the moment it was released.

Switch could definitely have used more oomph. Many frame rate drops in the Zelda games. Many emulators claim to have the superior experience with those games.

Which is correct. Plus a Wii game with 4k texture packs will look better than any HD remake

I am deeply unimpressed with most of the 4K texture packs out there. I see a lot of this:

https://twitter.com/letofski/status/982947652072488962

Same. Just rendering at 1080p / 4k is good enough to give most titles a nicer shine though :)

Actually Nintendo consoles used to be powerhouses until recently. The NES, SNES, N64 and GameCube were all considered state-of-the-art in terms of performance. It wasn't until the Wii when they began cutting down on performance in favor of fun features like they had been doing in the handheld space.

Especially N64 - SGI indy in a small box. They did change the narrative after they couldn't or wouldn't compete on those numbers (rightfully so it turned out), however, they were always experimenting with controls and were highly influential in doing so.

appropriate username, btw, but that console is for another topic!

Pretty sure the NES was designed to a price point first and foremost. Especially after the video game crash. Hence the dirt-cheap 6502 derivative in it.

The NES -- as far as its basic hardware architecture -- was not designed for a market where the video game crash had even occurred. It was designed for release in Japan in 1983 as the Famicom, undoubtedly the most powerful console in the market at the time -- a time where by the way I'm not sure what else you would even put in a console other than a 6502 or Z80.

If you wanted cheap above all, you could have gone for a plain 6502 or a cut-down variant (like the 6507 in the Atari VCS), but they also didn't do that -- the Ricoh 2A03 is a custom part that includes custom sound hardware.

> If you wanted cheap above all, you could have gone for a plain 6502 or a cut-down variant (like the 6507 in the Atari VCS), but they also didn't do that -- the Ricoh 2A03 is a custom part that includes custom sound hardware.

The higher integration on a single chip for the 2A03 was absolutely a cost saving move.

That doesn't match my recollection. The Gameboy is a early counter example: it was black and white during a time where the game gear had color, yet the Gameboy was far more popular. Also I believe the Xbox was more powerful than the GameCube.

I remember kids with the game gear. Hardly ever saw them playing because of the batteries. For a portable console I think it was a choice on battery life.

The game gear was extremely lousy to use. Too small of a screen, ate through batteries incredibly quickly, the original, external battery pack (not included) was poorly made and didn't help that much either.

And the game selection early on was pretty lousy too. Sonic was only fun for a while.

People are doing amazing things with game gear hardware as of late, though. All of that addressed spectacularly.

And it only took thirty-five years!

Also huge in size compared to the screen dimensions. Could barely get my hands around it as a little kid.

Then the Nomad was even bigger!

A "wall wart" power source was a necessity.

The Game Gear didn't come out until one and a half year later. It's easy to see how it wasn't even remotely practical to release a color handheld system in 1989, and it's easy to argue that it wasn't practical in 1990 either, but Sega did it anyway.

So when the Game Boy came out it was easily the most powerful handheld system on the market (admittedly by virtue of being essentially the only one worth mentioning)

The Atari Lynx came out a few months after the Game Boy with a backlit color screen

And we're all still talking about that one regularly...

I remember thinking the commercials made it look cool when I was 4 or 5 (I vividly remember some sort of surfing game), but then I never encountered a single person who owned one. Same with the TurboGrafx-16.

"Some sort of surfing game" immediately screams California Games¹ to me. There was surfing² plus a few other sports, and it is still good fun if you find yourself at a museum/nerd house that has one.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Games

² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql2S-wXa-H8

Also, the color screen on the Game Gear wasn't that great and the battery life was terrible. I think Sega had realized this, because later on they were selling an external battery pack as an official accessory.

I found my Gameboy recently, but I did not find my games... Sad times...

The game boy got almost 30hours out of 4xAA whereas the game gear got about an hour or two of life out of 6xAA. I hated that about the game gear and it meant I hardly ever got to play it.

"recently" as in nearly 25 years ago

Yes, in terms of their video game history, Nintendo has been blue ocean (2004-2024+) longer than they were red (1983-2003).

NES? Yes.

SNES... Somewhat? I think there were tradeoffs here between that and the genesis; You got more colors and could get better sound out of the SNES... On the flip side people did -amazing- things with the YM2612 and for all the SNES RPG Soundtracks I love, they don't slap like the Streets of Rage series or Sanic.

N64 had pretty good perf but the Cartridge format made it -very- expensive to do anything very fancy; this is one of the reasons that lots of folks feel PS1 had better looking games despite N64's superior specs.

GameCube... Sits in a very weird spot IMO, but that whole generation was a bit Zany due to how everyone was experimenting with different 'paths to faster/better 3d'. Dreamcast had lots of 'special' stuff, GC was unique in it's own right, PS2's biggest stumble IIRC was too little ram for the GS...

To me, the bigger 'paradigm shift' that Nintendo made with the Wii was preferring more COTS-y stuff versus more special custom things...

NES had the Special Ricoh 6502 variant. SNES had the SPC. N64... TBH was mostly SGI based so possibly the exception. Gamecube had a custom GPU (Flipper)...

Wii is for the most part an 'incremental' upgrade from GC Hardware, and the Switch uses a not-that-special Tegra AFAIK.

the Gamecube certainly not. it was on par with other consoles of the time but released later so nothing that you could call SOTA

Nintendo's first example of this is probably the most famous: the Gameboy was very underpowered compared to its competitor and absolutely trounced them on its way to become a household name and one of the most popular consoles of all time.

Recently?

My dude, the GameCube was released nearly 23 years ago.

There is a wider time delta betwixt the GameCube's release and today than there is between the NES and the GameCube.

switch was ancient tech, but still predates usb-c enough that they're rolling their own power protocols.. hence deluge of broken switch on ebay with fried usb-c ports...

Switch in no way predated USB-C, even talking widespread support... Nintendo rolled their own protocol because they could and USB allows for it.

Fun video games never went away. Look for games by indie developers instead of AAA titles.

There are many fun AAA titles, more than one can play

The conversation’s context is fun games without needing the latest hardware.

The majority of my indie titles run on a potato.

Many indie games use Unity and have terrible performance. Source: I have a potato (by which i mean i use the integrated graphics of an i7-56xx)

It can run many games well, so it depends how much developers value performance.

As a player, I do not really value performance unless we're talking sub 25fps.

Same. But some titles have like 3fps (Train Valley World for example)

Performance is not just a simple number. 25 FPS with good frame pacing is much more enjoyable than something that averages 60 FPS but with individual frame times all over the place. That said, for first-person action games especially on a non-tiny monitor, anything below ~40 FPS will be noticeably non-smooth. Other game types have more tolerance, e.g. a top down strategy game could still be playable at ~15 FPS.

A lot of fun old AAA games run on potatoes. And there's so many of them that you won't have issues finding something new to you.

> I look forward to an eventual return to fun video games

They weren't saying they wanted games that run on old hardware. It's just the trope of "back then hardware was bad and games were good. Now hardware is good and games are bad."

Look at anything from publisher New Blood Interactive on Steam for a starting point. Mostly retro style FPS from differing eras, but there are a few other game types. Plus you'll struggle to find any that don't have thousands of user ratings in either very positive or overwhelmingly positive brackets.

Gloomwood (first person stealth) and Fallen Aces are a couple of gems still in early access.

It's actually a golden age for fun video games, because we are swimming in new beautiful, engaging, original titles every year.

Some things really take you by surprise as well.

I never saw Inscryption, Disco Eliseum or Hades coming, and I think nobody did.

And even oldish games still have great value. I still play LoL or Isaac, and they are as good as they were on day 1.

Plus, you get the Switch then the Deck refreshed portable gaming experience. The latter made emulation so nice as well.

With terrific communities, insane speed runners, devs coming up with crazy new concepts and hardware that never stop to get better, it's hard to complain except that with a busy life, you will see only 1% of those masterpieces.

Inscryption is a must play.

I will remember it forever, it's a unique experience.

But it's such a weird combination of aesthetic, story telling and gameplay I have to assume it prevents a huge part of the gaming population from enjoying it.

If anybody read those comments, DO NOT LOOK THE GAME UP if you plan to play it. Go blind.

I binged it during the time I was trapped in my room with COVID. You're right, it is a very weird game(s?) in the best way, it's literally sent me off on a card game design jaunt that's still ongoing haha. And I found myself loving the characters of the, what was it, ocelot and the wizard apprentice who is glad to have any kind of STIM-U-LA-TION?

> I never saw (…) Hades coming, and I think nobody did.

I don’t think Hades came as a surprise to anyone who was already a fan of the devs from Bastion and Transistor.

Come on, Bastion is nice but nowhere as sophisticated as Hades. Neither the gameplay nor the replayability would have let you think the team had the ability at the time.

As for transistor, the story is basically "futuristic world is being destroyed by virus-type-invaders and your sword/companion is the key to beating it", with a predictable end and almost zero character dev.

Being able to make ok games doesn't translate to the skill to make a masterpiece.

It was a quantum leap.

It would be like saying you can deduce Divinity Original sin 2 would be amazing because you played the first one.

I disagree. Sure, there are fun games, but they're so hard to find among all the crap

The noise/signal ratio is worse for everything today: movies, music, tv shows.

But "finding good games requires a tiny bit of effort to me" is a first-world problem.

Ray tracing might be eye candy, but fast streaming of assets from SSD enables experiences not possible before (large scale open world, super fast movement a la Spiderman, instant teleportation).

GPU-powered dynamic lighting and LOD is also pretty crazy.

It wasn't clear from your post, but have you kept up with the PC indie scene of the last decade or so? There's a lot of great small gems on Steam these days that can run on old hardware (or the Deck).

But apparently the golden age is ending, as big publishers this year and last canceled a lot of projects and closed a bunch of studios. Sad, but there's still a huge backlog of great titles to go through.

Well said. Some ingredients that were in old games has vanished due to the post 2000 culture, but we can go back.

> Some ingredients that were in old games has vanished due to the post 2000 culture

Hmm, like what?

One factor (surprisingly I've seen this mentioned by a video game guy on youtube few years ago) is the disbelief made by non game visual art. Game boxes, booklets, they bootstraped the imagination. Handmade art was 100x more detailed than 8bit games yet we didn't care having a low res 8bit characters because we were already mentally in the world displayed on paper.

I do sincerly miss the limited rendering aspect of old titles. The limitations gave ways to a distinct style, and kept the game a game, in a strange world. It also provided you with some surprises.. how did they manage to pull off some effect on a tiny 8 or 16bit machine. Hardware of today removes that wonder. There's less contrast.

The limitations of old game platforms didn't vanish, they are still used (and being re-discovered by new generations). One of my favorite games on this side of the new millennium is Celeste, for example.

Some indie studios are even producing new games for GBA, GB, NES and other platforms from the 90s, sometimes including booklet and packaging!

Ah fine, I lost track of the indie space. I shall resume.

There's been a bit of a "PS1 aesthetic" enthusiasm recently too.

You may find TIC-80 interesting.

> the disbelief made

I assume you mean the suspension of disbelief? I.e. immersion. Suspension is a key word there, as in, your disbelief is halted, allowing you to be immersed.

The problem is when even Nintendo’s own first party titles are struggling with the hardware. That wasn’t that common with the Wii, 3DS, or previous consoles but very very very noticeable on Switch

Super Mario 64 had abysmal performance for a title on the N64 that wasn't even that complicated compared to things that would later release on the console.

But in the 90s, when you got home with your very first device capable of rendering "real time" 3D graphics for $200, you didn't really care that "real time" meant 12fps at times. We used to have pretty low standards for framerate.

One guy optimized Mario 64 to run at 60FPS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_rzYnXEQlE

Mario 64 on the N64 was build without -O2 flags. Maybe with -O0 or even -g. After a simple compiler switch, the speed skyrocketed.

And from what I understand, it’s not due to incompetence; rather, it’s due to not yet having confidence that those optimizers wouldn’t introduce bugs. The SDK and toolchain were very new; SM64’s development itself parallels that of the dev toolchain.

So, better safe than sorry, especially with a pack-in launch title.

Kaze, who did that 60FPS optimization, has commented on other videos about how the CPU isn't fully utilized anyways, so -O2 doesn't make too much a difference in most scenarios.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_gdOKSTaxM&lc=UgyhTG4Ol46Rr...

His comment, not the video.

Ah, TIL, thanks.

I forgive them for abysmal for one of the first games released for a wildly new platform for them.

Inscryption

Subnautica

Satisfactory

Factorio

Hollow Knight

RE7

Baba is You

Baldur's Gate 3

Elden Ring

Dead Cells

Hades

Ori and the Will of the Wisp

Disco Elysium

Dishonored 1 & 2

Orcs Must Die

Planet Coaster

Portal 1 & 2

Read Dead Redemption 2

Valheim

I dont' know what you mean by "modern," but these were all games I enjoyed recently-ish, and I'm sure I forgot some.

Off the top of my head I'd say to throw in Outer Wilds (wilds, not worlds), Tunic, The Riven remake, and The Talos Principle 1 & 2 as well.

The Talos Principle is phenomenal, fantastic effort by Croteam

Yeah. And tbh while I enjoyed the first game quite a bit I was absolutely blown away by the second game. Visuals, OST, all the vibrant characters were absolutely breathtaking.

For handhelds I'd say the Playdate [0] does this pretty well. Lots of fun and very experimental indie games.

For home consoles I hope a single board computer flls this role one day. In fact I've been experimenting with the raspberry pi to try and turn it into a console for new games but just haven't spent enough time on the project yet.

[0] https://play.date/

A story does not require a bunch of words either but there are a lot of great, long books. There are also great short stories.

Same thing goes for games that demand high performance rigs. It’s all about what you want in the end, and there’s no single answer for what makes a game fun. Some people really like beautiful, realistic looking games with high resolutions and frame rates. To them that is fun.

Good point. Most of the games I have played in recent years have been indie titles. Sometimes they are CPU intensive but rarely GPU intensive.

It feels like graphics in games have reached a sort of plateau now where the most visually realistic games are only marginally more realistic looking than something from nearly 10 years ago.

"I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding,"

It's been a meme for a while and I unironically agree.

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