this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

emulators are for the transient people

[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I wish this anime could stop reminding me that everything I know and love is dying faster than I can.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Frieren is so good even though it makes me feel feelings.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago

I tried that and it hurts.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 4 days ago (9 children)

NGL, I don't feel like the Xbox 360 or Wii are really "retro". A lot of the games still hold up decently well from a visual standpoint imo. Obsolete? Sure. Old? Sure. Retro? Nah.

I think the GameCube generation is the border of "retro". That's where you still had some games that looked old (like Animal Crossing), but you also had games that still look relatively good (like Pikmin). Imagine calling Crysis "retro". That's the same generation we're talking about.

I'm also saying this as someone who remembers the N64 fairly well.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I mean, the 360 can run GTA 5...

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 days ago (1 children)

And skyrim! Anything retro can't do that

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago

Yeah Skyrim was only released 14 years ago! Wait-… wait, oh no 👴 ⏰

[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

The Xbox 360 had 512 MB of RAM that it shared between its CPU and GPU. I have 128x that amount of RAM in my PC right now. That's the same multiple as the difference between the 360 and the N64.

Imagine calling Crysis “retro”.

This is a video that came out back in 2007. He is using 2x of the highest end GPU you could buy at the time in SLI to run Crysis at 720p with an average of 27 FPS:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PSI9nvIXaF4

Meanwhile here is a demo using the highest end GPU you can buy right now to render a forest at 4K resolution and 60+ FPS (16x more pixels and more than 2x the fps, if we're keeping track):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7tp4eg0ax8

Most of the maps in Crysis were a few hundred feet across. The forest map in the video above is 4 square kilometers.

Crysis is retro my dude. It is as old now as Super Mario World was when it released.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

This is a good example of how powerful hardware is now and how games that run like shit don't have much excuse other than horrible management.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

The engines themselves have gotten better at pushing pixels too.

Remember all the hype about Euclideon "infinite detail" stuff back in the early 2010s? How they had a data structure that pre-sorted their voxel data in such a way that they could switch between rendering big and tiny voxels depending on the player's point of view, seamlessly and in real time?

We have that now, just with polygons instead of voxels, which actually makes it even more technically impressive since Nanite has to maintain the mesh's coherence (though I guess in some ways Nanite is a bit worse, since there's only so much it can reduce a mesh before it disappears, whereas you can just keep making voxels bigger and bigger).

The foliage you see in that forest demo is Nanite geometry.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

You are right, it's all very impressive tech, but most UE5 games still suffer from TAA. Maybe at 4K+ it looks great, but at lower resolutions it's like the screen is coated in a thin layer of Vaseline. The push for realistic graphics, left graphical fidelity behind.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago

Xbox 360 is 20 years old as of Nov 2025.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

some games that looked old (like Animal Crossing)

There's a good reason for that one: the first animal crossing game was originally made for Nintendo 64, though that version was only released in Japan. GameCube got a port of it and that port (plus some extra features) is what released in English.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 days ago (1 children)

agreed, anything that came after whatever was current when I was born is new and everything that happened before I was born is prehistory :3

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

Woof c:

Pup would love to play with vacuum tube stuff tho c:

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 days ago (2 children)

When I say "retro game" I mean pre-disc era.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 days ago

O shit guys, my entire steam library is disc-less

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

if the switch 2 uses discs you would be correct

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Has a hardrive

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

Dreamcast gets the special distinction of being retro futurist. Criminally ahead of its time.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

When ‘next-gen’ becomes ‘current gen’ (as we see the PS5 now), then the previous ‘last gen’ (ie. PS3) becomes retro.

Reminder to anyone who disagrees with the above, the PS3 was released 18+ years ago. You’re just old, like me - embrace it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

No.

The Wii is perpetually 5 years old 👉😆👈 I'm not listening lalalalala time is a man made concept

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago (4 children)

2012 laptops are still very modern and people calling them old are mean :(

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Given how maimed the modern laptops are, I'm willing to consider "modern" a slur for laptops. Give me back my Ethernet, video outs and all the USB!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago

Give me back my Ethernet

Some ThinkPad: I have Ethernet
Buyer: Cool! I am choosing you!
Package arrives
Unpacks
Buyer: What the... there's no Ethernet!
Some ThinkPad: Look closer! There's even Ethernet icon!
Buyer: I see that, but there's just...
Some ThinkPad: That's it! ThinkPad Ethernet extension port. You didn't say "RJ-45".

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

I have a laptop for uni work that I bought in Jan 2011. It's got Lubuntu running on it and most of my work is done on Google Docs... so I'm not seeing the benefit of upgrading really.

It works.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

yes exactly!

stop being mean to my thinkpad friends! (those being, friends with thinkpads, and laptops themselves, which are automatically friends)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 days ago

Not a joke: When I was playing the Wii for the first time I legit thought "Damn, when this becomes retro Ima feel so old."
Prophetic.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago

Granny you are 1000 years old.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Retro isn't a number. It's two disconnects. There is always something new - innately distinct, previously implausible, promising of future trends. When new things change enough, stuff that existed beforehand becomes old - tangibly dated, behind the times, automatically uncool. When that new stuff in turn becomes old, the old-old stuff becomes retro - distinct from merely out-of-fashion, illustrative of shifting perspectives, capable of being judged on its own merits.

This is why it's possible to make brand-new games that are still "retro games." The indicators of a particular era no longer feel poor-quality or unpleasantly limited once they've lost direct comparison to modern novelty. Low resolution is a style choice now that it's plainly not performance-related. Limited color is an affectation. 3D can be taken for granted, so games doing it badly are doing it on purpose.

I say all this to argue: the 360's not retro because it's not even retro. It's just fucking old. The last big disconnect was in that era. GTA IV looks like an upscaled PS2 game and GTA V still feels like a mid-budget PS5 game. PBR shading, local lights-- I don't think GTA V specifically had screen-space reflections, but it was definitely A Thing by then. Volumetric fog was in PS3 launch titles.

Christ, even retro-as-a-style has its inflection point in the 360 era. Cave Story was a big fucking deal. XBLA gave small indie games a taste of revenue. GBA homebrew shifted neatly to shoving emulators on PSP.

It is increasingly difficult to make any game that was unprecedented ten years prior. The toolkit gets wider and wider, but even a sudden massive increase in rendering power wouldn't allow much that we haven't expertly faked. VR would be different if anyone starts buying it. I feel like the PS4 came and went without any distinguishing features whatsoever. (I don't even remember if it was the bold black rectangle or the italic black rectangle.) Contrast this with how Super Mario Bros launched against an Atari that boasted several sprites, and then the NES's last official game was on shelves beside Tekken 2.

The counterargument to this might be that anything without live-service gacha bullshit is now old. In which case... burn it all down and start over.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

Retro-as-a-style used to be the ONLY meaning of "retro." It was something new that was made to look old. When it comes to games it usually just means "old" now. I personally consider the 360 and PS3 to be not retro because the general conventions of how they control and the way they were online and capable of getting updates is pretty much identical to today. They're old, all right, but other than having less polygons and post-processing effects they're not different enough from the games of today, as you said. The Wii is something of an anomaly and different enough that I'd consider it retro.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Hot take: No console with significant connectivity requirements can ever be retro. That’s pretty much everything in the last twenty years.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

I was going to quibble with you regarding the OG Xbox and PS2, but then I looked up their release dates. I feel so goddamn old.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

"What do you mean, there's a WPA?"

spoilerDS and DS lite can connect to WEP or open networks

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

Retro means Atari !

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