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Post by Ex on Jun 5, 2018 9:57:50 GMT -5
I'm 39 years old and I find the glitchy shifty polygons of the PS1 charming. Meanwhile I absolutely hate sprite flickering in NES games. I'm not sure I buy the nostalgia bias angle.
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Post by Xeogred on Jun 5, 2018 19:36:24 GMT -5
I'm 39 years old and I find the glitchy shifty polygons of the PS1 charming. Meanwhile I absolutely hate sprite flickering in NES games. I'm not sure I buy the nostalgia bias angle. The secret hidden message in between here...
16 BIT IS ETERNAL AND PERFECT!
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Post by Sarge on Jun 5, 2018 22:14:07 GMT -5
Strangely, I've been playing NES for so long that I barely notice the flicker anymore. It's just... there, but doesn't bother me.
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Post by Ex on Jun 6, 2018 1:46:52 GMT -5
The sprite flicker always bothered me, even as a kid. Thankfully good NES emulators allow you to disable it. I always do.
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Post by anayo on Jun 10, 2018 18:19:32 GMT -5
Lately it occurred to me that I don’t like American candy. This is a strange conclusion to reach since I am myself American. I may have had ancestors from Scotland or Germany or somewhere like that, however my upbringing was not particularly multicultural. We never spoke anything except English at home. When I took my lunchbox to school, it had a peanut butter sandwich in it, not kimchi.
Anyway, for some reason American grocery stores only carry two kinds of candy: sweet, and chocolate. Sometimes they’ll add citric acid to make the sweet candies sour. There’s also novelty candies like pop rocks. But these belong to the “sweet” category and exist just to subvert everyone’s expectations enough to drum up interest and perhaps fill an untapped sales niche. If they were too far outside the American concept of what “candy” can and can’t be, it would gross people out and no one would buy it.
I wasn’t aware of this until I tried Central and South American candy, which adds a third category - spiciness. For example if you go to a Hispanic grocery store you can buy something like fruity dum-dum’s coated in chili powder. They also use a lot of tamarind, which I guess is a fruit with a sweet taste and chewy texture. They’ll also add chili powder to that.
Another example of stuff outside the American concept of candy would be Japanese mochi, which is only mildly sweet. I think it’s made out of soybeans or something, so it has a rubbery texture. The texture seems to be the main draw to eating it, not the sweetness. This makes sense, as American friends of mine who have lived in Japan tell me that Japanese people don’t really take to the American notion of carpet-bombing everything with sugar. In a related case, I was talking to a Middle Eastern friend of mine who told me that in her country, they’d consider it really gross how Americans add fruit to yogurt. I ate danimals and gogurt as a kid, but I had to admit to my friend that while grocery shopping as an adult, I’d want to buy yogurt, but most of the brands available were so sweet they may as well be candy, and I wanted yogurt, not candy.
This is hardly the only thing that goes against the grain in American culture but is a hit overseas. Case in point: tragedies. Americans generally want happy endings to our stories because we like to win. It’s hardwired into our worldview to believe the future will be better than the present. So most Americans probably wouldn’t warm up to the Japanese novel “Kokoro”, which ends with a double suicide, or the Studio Ghibli film “The Wind Rises” which ends in an equally heartbreaking way. I think the farther East you go, the more receptiveness you’ll find to tragic fiction, since I brought this up with a Phillipino friend and he told me, “I’m Asian, man. I love that stuff.”
How does all this connect to retro gaming? Well, for the longest time I thought retro gaming was one of two things: 1) self-indulgently waxing about the “good old days”. 2) a love of challenge independent of graphics that meet current-day technological standards. The importance of these two factors can’t be discounted, but I think I was overlooking a third, which is 3) suspending your disbelief to put yourself back in the era of the game’s release and imagine how it would have affected people back then. In other words, “No, this doesn’t live up to current day standards. But we’re not evaluating it by current day standards.” Of course, this is predicated on the acknowledgment that there is more than one set of standards in the first place.
It’s true that nostalgia can inspire this. I wouldn’t be so impressed by Virtua Racing and Zero Tolerance if I hadn’t owned a Sega Genesis as a kid. However, this kind of notional time travel doesn’t require you to have necessarily been alive during the time period you’re traveling to. Why do I find Atari’s “Tempest” so impressive even though it came out before my parents met each other? Why are Commodore 64 tech demos and SID tunes so alluring to me when the first computer I ever used was a 386? I think the possibilities of what can be done on an 8-bit CPU and mere kilobytes of memory is worth appreciating just like snacks from other countries who don’t follow the American notions of what is and isn’t paletteable.
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Post by Ex on Jun 10, 2018 23:42:56 GMT -5
anayo makes a good point about judging a retro game by its peers at the time, rather than by today's standards. (Although for all our graphical evolution, I still often think game designs have devolved. We all know why.) Sometimes when I play a retro game, I try to imagine myself at the age the game released, and play it from that perspective. If I was 14 and rented this game for the weekend, how would I feel about it back then? That sort of thing. As for Japanese candy, "Gummy Tsureta" is amazing. If you've never had it, order the grape flavored kind off Amazon. I also really love all the Popin' Cookin' kits, especially the sushi one. And these little bastards are good too.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 10, 2018 23:59:24 GMT -5
Here's the thing about older games, though: even if they don't have the latest and greatest tech behind them, you could see instances where the artistic design really shined through. I'm sure there are people that would judge 8-bit games and say they look like trash, but I look and see the great (or bad) art behind the pixels. There's some beautiful stuff out there, and it's made even more impressive considering the tech.
Same deal with chiptunes. Now, I love chiptunes, and I'm sure part of that is my listening to them for so long. At the same time, though, you can't help but be impressed, by, say a Tim Follin tune. Knowledge of the system limitations once again makes it an even more laudable achievement. There are some absolute works of genius there. And in some ways, the limitations actually aided developers. The one thing I like about a lot of retro games is that they tend to have strong melodies. Those tunes will really stick in your head, or at least the best ones will. (I have Silver Surfer kickin' in my brain right now, actually!)
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Post by Deleted on Jun 11, 2018 4:48:22 GMT -5
I was talking to a Middle Eastern friend of mine who told me that in her country, they’d consider it really gross how Americans add fruit to yogurt. I ate danimals and gogurt as a kid, but I had to admit to my friend that while grocery shopping as an adult, I’d want to buy yogurt, but most of the brands available were so sweet they may as well be candy, and I wanted yogurt, not candy. It's not just gross, eating diary products like milk and yogurt with fruit is definitely a bad idea. It's funny how the popular banana milkshake is actually one of the worst offenders. Generally speaking, I tend to eat fruit moderately given their relatively high sugar content and you shouldn't eat them during your meals - ideally you want to eat them 30-60 minutes before. If our stomach is already busy digesting other food, it won't be able to process the sugar contained in the fruit and it'll be left to ferment. Also, yogurt is a great source of proteins and healthy fats, that is, pure Greek yogurt with no added sugar. Artificial sweeteners are just as bad. Personally, I don't really need to suspend my disbelief when playing retro games. I believe that the recent boom of retro-inspired indie games proves that older game design speaks to the player in ways most modern games don't. However, I'd rather play those original games from the past rather than newer games trying to capture that feeling of old with varying degrees of success. I believe that indie games trying to replicate that zeitgeist to a fault and bringing nothing new to the table are actually shooting themself in the foot and killing innovation. It's a thin line to walk.
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Post by Ex on Jun 11, 2018 9:48:57 GMT -5
you could see instances where the artistic design really shined through /it's made even more impressive considering the tech I wasn't trying to insinuate that 8 or 16-bit graphics are inferior to modern graphics. I can absolutely appreciate the aesthetics and detail talented artists were able to convey using such limited means. With 8-bit graphics every single pixel matters on screen, and must somehow support its corresponding pixels. When you're making a character's eye with three pixels, and can still convey a range of emotions by simply manipulating the placement of those three pixels, that's talent. I'm especially impressed when 8-bit games can pull off strong atmospheric moods... like say NES Batman. The way Sunsoft used offset tile designs in that game is absolutely genius (the shadowing in the backgrounds for instance). The one thing I like about a lot of retro games is that they tend to have strong melodies. Because of their limited capability, 8-bit APUs have very constrained polyphony, thus the ability to produce chords is practically null. In addition a lack of DSP means reverb isn't easy. What all that means is that producing orchestrated or symphonic OSTs is not ideal to say the least (in this regard the NES is the stark opposite of the SNES). Rather 8-bit APUs excel at producing single waveform unique elements. Because of that, it's more practical to produce music that pushes forth a strong melody, accompanied by supporting embellishment. That's why NES games often have strong arpeggios (square channel) and crescendos (triangle channel), done in an overt staccato style. Usually with the noise channel acting as drums and the pulse channels producing the bass line. Although a lot of games save one pulse channel to produce sound effects with, thereby not interrupting the tune. I believe that indie games trying to replicate that zeitgeist to a fault and bringing nothing new to the table are actually shooting themself in the foot and killing innovation. I've often thought this myself. I mean, if you're gonna design a game that apes the past, then also include some forward thinking design evolution to the formula, or at least implement thoughtful twists to the standards. Inti Creates did a perfect job of this ethos via their recent Bloodstained - Curse of the Moon. Unfortunately your average indie game designer(s) are a far cry from Inti Creates.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 11, 2018 10:24:08 GMT -5
Oh, yeah, I know you weren't insinuating as such. I was just saying that others outside of the hobby often might sneer at it. Sometimes, it's tough for me to separate my feelings from the matter, though; I'm not exactly an objective observer!
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