Random Gaming Thoughts

[prfsnl_gmr]

Ys X and a remake of Ys: The Oath in Felghana have both been announced for Switch. I’d be down for a re-release of the older titles. (I’d commit a felony for a physical collection of the TG16 Ys games.). At this point, and although I never thought I’d say it, I think we have too much Ys right now…

[BoneSnapDeez]

Ys X and a remake of Ys: The Oath in Felghana have both been announced for Switch. I’d be down for a re-release of the older titles. (I’d commit a felony for a physical collection of the TG16 Ys games.). At this point, and although I never thought I’d say it, I think we have too much Ys right now…

If the entire series was nothing but Ys 1-4 on PCE it would probably still be my favorite ARPG series ever. Everything that follows those just feels like a bonus. Falcom absolutely dominated the PCE.


Oh, and Felghana is great but Falcom truly took mastery of that game engine with Ys Origin, which is one of the best "modern" ARPGs. Cautiously optimistic about Ys X.

[RCBH928]

Every time I stumble upon WorldOfLongPlays on Youtube I think these guys must have quit by now, only to check their latest upload was few hours ago...

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

I'm currently working on my top 250 games of all time, and it's been a trip full of nostalgia. Sort of feels like filling a bookcase with retro games : )
Not sure if I should share it here (let me know if you're interested), but I do recommend others trying it out. Take your time!

[Limewater]

I'm currently working on my top 250 games of all time, and it's been a trip full of nostalgia. Sort of feels like filling a bookcase with retro games : )
Not sure if I should share it here (let me know if you're interested), but I do recommend others trying it out. Take your time!

Nah, nobody on this retro gaming message board would be interested in your retro gaming activities or your opinions about retro games.


Just in case that wasn't obvious, I would be very interested.

[prfsnl_gmr]

+1

Also interested.

[RCBH928]

There is a 1TB USB drive on Amazon for $20. At these prices, much larger capacity than the bluray's theoritical max capacity 100GB (do they even make those?) and obviously much faster transfer rate (no loading), will we see a come back of cartridges(never ever I thought the day will come) ? Or are we seeing the death of physical media altogether?

[Limewater]

There is a 1TB USB drive on Amazon for $20. At these prices, much larger capacity than the bluray's theoritical max capacity 100GB (do they even make those?) and obviously much faster transfer rate (no loading), will we see a come back of cartridges(never ever I thought the day will come) ? Or are we seeing the death of physical media altogether?

The switch runs on cards that are, essentially, cartridges.

You also DO have loading time from a hard drive/flash drive. It's still a serial data link. The older cartridges you could sort of claim "no load times" because memory could be directly addressed and read with parallel address/data lines.

[MrPopo]

It's also a matter of how much data needs to be transferred. On an NES cart your worst case is needing to fully refresh the background and hit the sprite limit, which is a total of 1.25kb that needs to be written, and usually you don't need to do a full background refresh; the tiles persist across frames and you only need to update when you scroll, and the way things are architected you can do it a line of tiles at a time. By contrast, a modern game is going to use a ton of memory for the textures that will be rendered on the scene, and transferring all of that data is going to take much longer, comparatively speaking.

[Limewater]

It's also a matter of how much data needs to be transferred. On an NES cart your worst case is needing to fully refresh the background and hit the sprite limit, which is a total of 1.25kb that needs to be written, and usually you don't need to do a full background refresh; the tiles persist across frames and you only need to update when you scroll, and the way things are architected you can do it a line of tiles at a time. By contrast, a modern game is going to use a ton of memory for the textures that will be rendered on the scene, and transferring all of that data is going to take much longer, comparatively speaking.

Yes! You can see an example of this on a cartridge game with the N64 version of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.

There is a level where you ride a minecart in a big loop, room to room. If you go full throttle the game can't keep up with the textures, so you wind up seeing texture-less rooms.