way better
It’s also about what aspects of the old medium are easy to implement using modern tools. Those PS1 artifacts would be very challenging to recreate using Unity. That’s why Sonic Mania had its own proprietary engine to plausibly match stuff like the special stage 3d.
Actually, believe it or not but I implemented most of them (specifically, texture warping, vertex snapping plus 15-bit color with dithering) the other day precisely because I was wondering how challenging it’d be and it’s literally 15 lines of simple HLSL shader code for about half an hour of total work (from googling the necessary info to debugging, and I’m not a very good shader programmer), and those can be easily plugged anywhere. It requires nowhere near the level of knowledge or effort a NTSC shader does, and you get those everywhere. And in fact at least one person has already made a PS1 shader pack for unity.
EDIT: Here’s the short test I captured back then (using a sample room from Omikron and very crappy camera controls. That black bar at one point is when I erroneously grabbed the window’s bottom instead of the camera):
There is one PS1 visual artifact that’s kinda complex and time-consuming to reproduce, it’s its depth sorting because that one has deep ramifications in the whole rendering process and you’ve gotta do pretty much the whole geometry transform phase manually.
Sonic Mania’s special stages are a different thing, mode 7-style graphics the mega CD was capable of, which behave differently from PS1 3d (they’re perspective-correct). They’re raster-based rather than polygon-based so depending on how accurate you want to get you’ve gotta think seriously about how to approach it.
this is chromatic aberration, an effect usually the result of a poorly set lens. however, seeing as the fake date they give for the game is in the early 30s (1931?) and the game is presented in color, the cartoon would have been likely shot in Technicolor, who had a 3 strip printing process at the time. we can go far enough with this info to say that the print that we’re viewing is some leftover junker that had the strips misaligned during printing and that also you can turn the effect off in the options screen
also film can be real grainy and that’s not bad, better than washing it away like certain restorations
edit: it should be noted that when chromatic aberration is usually employed by a 3D, “realistic” looking game, it is in the pursuit of fooling our brains as introducing artifcats and whatnot can take things out of the uncanny valley. some games just go overboard with it, film influence or no
i mean, idk, but this feels pretty dang close
The difference between me really liking this game and so many that informed it that I didn’t like was a life counter, just letting me replay and push through the challenge is what is making my day.
holy shit
this is one of my favorite things i have ever read on this website.
it honestly helps me with finding my identity in this weird hobby that partially disgusts me but has also captured so much of my interest for most of my life
obsessive toxic nerds are exceptionally good at ruining things. videogames and the consumer culture that has cultivated around it apparently seems to draw in the biggest crowd of these jerks?
this is why i love this forum, the majority of folks here seem to at least have a decent handle on things (re: not having these enjoyable & enriching pieces of media and art run our entire personality traits all the time)
anyways Fuck the Candy Boss
it just seems so negligent to make a fake creepypasta ps1 game and omit texture warping. that’s like the most uncanny part of the look!
To be fair, it’s an effect that seems complex to reproduce in modern shaders until you discover it’s actually just one flag in the texture declaration, albeit a somewhat obscure one.
What’s striking about that reinterpretation is how much nicer the bullets look in pixel art. Everything in Cuphead proper looks great except for the bullets which are weirdly weightless and out of place.
the ‘nothing fits properly’ aesthetic of the 90s really did advantage a certain kind of dude. the kind who could be an x-files chara
Honestly everyone in that frame looks like they could be an X-Files character
Had to buy a new gamepad because I destroyed the previous one playing cuphead and now I am in King Dice. Which I think I like more as an idea than actual execution. There are two sub bosses (the skeleton horse and the monkey) that I don’t like at all. The horse because who thought that a shooter section with stuff that obscure your vision was a good idea and the monkey because it takes forever to do and becomes a bore.
Invincible dash make a lot of King Dice bosses trivial though, so at least you can make it shorter if you want to.
It also gets pretty easy to get the dice rolls you want with practice.
Hot take with a question mark: this game is easier than Punch-Out!!, maybe?
I’ll never do the hard mode stuff but I’m interested in co-op.
Yeah, it just a matter of having the hearts landing on the two bosses I don’t like.
On the other hand: the devil. When it does the dragon head attack, anyone knows what hits you when it withdraw the head? I dodge by going to one of the borders of the screen, and sometimes I get hit? Is not the small devils, and sometimes happens and sometimes not. So I am not sure if it’s something I don’t see of hitbox shenanigans.