The installer for oblivion lost remake 2.5 is a great game in itself
6 Likes
The idea of progress as absolute thing is absurd in every arena, including video games.
Who gets to decide what counts as an advance? Did the Aztecs have more advanced art than Japan in the 1500s? Than Iran? Whoās measure are these wildly varied styles compared to? Europeās?
Is A Fistfull of Dollars a worse movie than Iron Man because there isnāt any CGI? Is The Secret of Nimh a worse movie than Cars because it was animated on Cels?
What if the companies that have money to
Make games donāt want a deep story? What if you tell a story using visual novel tech less advanced than VNs on the PSX? But still had a bigger emotional impact on me than Uncharted 3?
Which medium is better for art: Movies or Theater?
Does Crusade of Centy making me feel like I did an atrocity at the end stop making me feel that way because Control has RayTracing?
Was the totality of human experience and expression before our present moment futile because we have moved so far beyond it? Only the technology we have truly what defines art, and not the intention and craft it was made with?
These are all questions implied by your argument here. It just plain doesnāt make sense if you approach art as expression instead of as a tech demo.
7 Likes
As someone who would be hard pressed to pick a top five game newer than the early 90s, thereās flat out things that might be someoneās main draw to games that come from technological leaps or the constant dialogue between projects that progresses design.
I know folks whose primary interest is exploring large 3D sandboxes and something like Hunter is too primitive to scratch that itch.
On a non technological standpoint, something like Monster Hunter Worldās wheels within wheels of upgrade systems is born out of (outright sinister) stuff like FarmVille and absolutely would have been something that could have been tacked onto an old game but the concepts had to get hammered out and refined into the awful junk food approach people, like me, crave.
Why arenāt all the Doom folks going as hard for Wolfenstein 3D or Xybots or Berzerk?
5 Likes
Sure you could have edited your 1920s silent film like a Michael Mann movie but thereās a bunch of technical, financial, and social reasons that wasnāt happening. None of that makes silent movies definitively bad or inferior, but those newer developments are the hooks that appeal newer works to a lot of people.
7 Likes
You should watch the Grey Automobile if you want to see something kind of close to a silent era Michael Mann.
9 Likes
I mean yeah but also lol. Itās really hard to take this seriously when youāre talking about two games whose legacy is about advancing video games. To push it further are you saying itās absurd to say there is progress between Adventure and Demons Souls? Is it comprehensible when you hear someone say that weāve advanced past Wolfenstein?
I think the strongest argument for subjectivity isnāt that things are incomparable in terms of progress, but that there are so many measurements of progress that itās impossible to qualify one multitude wholely as better or worse than another. So, yeah, if you value X thing in Wolfenstein then many newer FPSes wonāt compare. But on the other hand, almost everyone making a video game values older games and wants to make a new one with a new feature that is, we hope, better than previous games in at least one measure.
1 Like
thereās a difference between saying that any vital modern art has to contend with the current state and history of the medium and do something new and saying that things have gotten better and improved and that current works are more successful as a result. this distinction is especially pronounced in a medium dominated by aesthetically regressive corporate interests.
14 Likes
Ah yes the hellscape of corporations with regressive aesthetic values will come about because people compared Z64 and Demons Souls.
Yeah, the video games as constantly improving consumer tech thing is always a bad approach. I had to check out on a certain podcast after a hearing a certain host utter the phrase ā4k, 120 frames per secondā 108 times too many.
6 Likes
doom has better movement, sound and level design than those. how the pieces of something fit together to great an entire impression is more important than visual fidelty or the sheer complexity of game systems. doom is fast, and you can go faster by moving diagonally. the guns are punchy, the enemy designs are distinct and the composure of an encounter can be read instantly and a plan for dealing with it can spring into your mind fully formed, then you execute and in a satisfying series of bloody explosions, or you fail to take everything into account and lose resources or die. it has an unusually tight and rewarding gameplay loop, like tetris. why do you think people like doom, because itās old?
3 Likes
My point was that Doom was itself the culmination of advances like youāre saying, but youāre free to suggest Iām a dumb dumb too.
5 Likes
imo doom is one of those things that people still seek out and enjoy specifically bc it isnt āadvancedā, like i think people still like the original star wars in part because it has cheesy 70s sci-fi rubber suits, thatās not a detriment, thatās the appeal
8 Likes
Something that the discussion of Stalker and Fearās control schemes above speak to.
2 Likes
Tried out the Playstation Accessible Controller (PAC), mainly doing set-up and testing with Like a Dragon Gaiden cos it was there. Iāll probably use it a lot for FFVII Rebirth and Like a Dragon 8 since RPGs tend to mesh well with these kinds of controllers. I feel like itāll struggle with any kind of aiming stuff. Anyway @meauxdal and anyone else interested, hereās some first thoughts.
The size of the thing is good but there are a few awkwardnesses that might be ironed out through long-term usage. The stick is always nearby (it extends about two inches out maximum) and I get the impression itās designed for two handed use or for you to mount the regular controller somewhere when you use the PAC. Both can be simultaneously active for a single playerās input and you donāt have to do any finnicky set-up which is nice, especially since you can only buy one PAC to begin with. So if you wanna play with two analog sticks you have to make space for the PS5 controller.
The buttons of the PAC are good in that they click nicely and donāt require large amounts of pressure to depress. The different caps are useful because the way it wants you to rest your palm means that you can create a miniature mountain range where the different peaks make contact with resting fingers or the palm and balls of the hand.
Iāve opted for the face buttons to be in a comfy ādefaultā with everything else being reachable with the hand edge. Iāll probably set them to toggle either in the controller config or in whatever game I play e.g. hold R2 to shoot.
I had to keep remembering that the central black disk is the entire X button (as Iāve set it up), not just the central white button label. Thereās only two of the ālongā caps that poke into the middle bit (that Iāve used for square and triangle here) which is annoying since I like to create a mini-piano keyboard of the most common buttons but only having two of them and the rest of the buttons arranged radially means you have to get creative. I donāt really want to move my palm around if I can help it but it feels like I can hit everything else with the edges of my palm fairly naturally.
The stick has three options and the default (bottom right of the three above) is the best for me, itās got a broad top and easy to control with an index finger. The ball stick feels extremely light (slightly cheap feeling) but would be best if you want an extremely sensitive stick. The top option is equivalent to a PS5 analog stick. You can orient the controller in 90 degree increments but I feel like having it on the left of the main disc (default) works for me. Everything is super easy to swap since itās all magnetic and even the button labels are neat little rubber pegs rather than permanent stickers.
The PAC is also wireless and has a chargeable battery. It doesnāt share the PS5 front port either so you can charge both simultaneously. Despite my gripes with the radial layout it does feel like theyāve considered little conveniences aside from just the controller itself. Like the XAC you can set up three different profiles to switch through and the PS5 menu for it is pretty simple and easy. You can bring up a clear layout at any point with the profile button beneath the stick.
I played Like A Dragon Gaiden and ran around and did some fights. It felt pretty natural but I use the XAC a lot so have decent muscle memory for new layouts. I think the size of the buttons helps a lot though. They feel textured and chunky so itās easy to remember āyour placeā when figuring it out for the first time. I have to have the PS5 controller nearby and was using a lap-high table on coasters so adjusting things was pretty easy to get comfy.
I think itās probably worth the money if you want to have a proper set-up on PS5 but aside from the PAC investment (and the money needed for this giant white whale to begin with), youāll likely want to invest in a proper surface to have it on. Iām planning on getting a velcro lap pad from Trabasack Curve Connect - Trabasack - Lap Desk and Bag in One as well as repurposing some of the Logitech additions I got for my XAC. If youāve not bought any of this before or canāt jerryrig something, youāre looking at pushing Ā£/$200 at least. The second analog stick is the trickiest challenge but when itās set-up it works very well. It also depends a lot on what you wanna play but if you also have a Switch/PC Iād probably save the XAC for more complex control schemes and just rely on accessibility options baked into big Sony games or more beefy multiplatform stuff.
You canāt use it for PC or remote play so it is not as good as XAC in most ways. The only way PAC is better is that it can be wireless and feels very āpremiumā. Oh also itās the only real option for PS5 so 
I donāt dislike it as a piece of hardware as much as I think the circumstances around it are kinda scummy. Will feel it out more when FFVIIR2 drops.
24 Likes
didnāt mean to call you dumb, it genuinely wasnāt clear to me why you were saying people liked doom more than wolf3d or berzerk.
i wouldnāt call it a culmination of advances, the advances in rendering techniques and storing level geometry just happened to be available to them. nuclear throne hits pretty much the same way as doom but it doesnāt have raycasting or variable floor heights. generally, better technology has allowed studios to articulate the mediocrity of their artistic visions more completely
5 Likes
I like this.
Nuclear Throne doesnāt use fancy rendering tech but even a low res screen flickery version would have been unlikely in 1993 since what it accomplishes is in response to DonPachi, Diablo, and Doom (lotsa Ds). Before you bake an apple pie, you have to create the whole universe, right? Thereās a parallel development of game design concepts thatās not totally shackled to technological improvements but arenāt independent of them.
8 Likes
yeah i canāt articulate a clean dividing line between technology and technique but the latter seems more important, maybe thatās an overreaction to the way the gaming press has always talked about technology though
9 Likes
1000%
1 Like
Yeah? I broadly agree with you?
I probably phrased it badly last night but my argument is literally that new tech doesnāt automatically make stuff better. Iām not sure how this is counter to my argument at all. ^.^;
1 Like
That isnāt the argument Iām making. Iām not saying new approaches canāt lead to new ideas, Iām trying to attack the idea that fundamentally progress is an objective improvement and that older media is worthless now fundamentally because itās lower tech.
I also think there is artistic merit to things like Berzerk and Wolfenstein 3D though. Like wolfenstein is a perfect example: there are so many games that are clones of Wolfenstein like Super Noahās Ark 3D to the pie-in-the-sky 3D engine? All of them are pretty bad, what makes Wolfenstein better?
The design and aesthetic considerations beyond the technology.
5 Likes