If you adjust for inflation, historically, it’s very cheap.
If you compare it to movie tickets, which in essence is 2-3 hours of entertainment for $25, it’s the same story.
Some games can give you hundreds of hours for close to the same price.
This excludes games with monthly fees or predatory in-game systems.
AAA titles have been $60 since the 90s iirc. The difference now, though, is the addition of paid DLC, micro transactions, etc that historically didn't exist, so I'd say it's a little bit of a toss up.
I always saw the higher $60 games were cartridge-based games, while the CD-ROM equivalent was cheaper. When everybody switched away from cartridges it dropped back down to $50 being the norm until around 2005-2006.
Really? I could swear that the top PS1 games were around $60. Granted this was about 30 years ago when I was a kid, so I could easily be mistaken, I just remember my parents bitching about them being expensive lol
Yeah, they were called Platinum over here. £20 each. Ideal for a younger me, who could never justify full price games and frankly wanted to play the older ones first anyway.
Yeah I remember Donkey Kong Country cost like $60 back in 1994 when it first released. That's like $100 today adjusted for inflation. Nowadays DLC, the cloud, hardware and the like adds to it, although hardware has always been pricey to an extent.
This is the comparison I end up making. Is it more up front? Yes, but will I get more hours out of it? Yes. Can I pick it up again without any additional cost? Yes. Can I be a goblin and not leave the comfort of my own house? Yes.
Two words, nuclear meltdown. Seriously though, city building games do still exist, although often the gameplay is part of a wider genre like 4X, kinda like stealth mechanics in action adventure games.
Max Payne "I was too tired to go on." or "I was afraid to go on."
Game over screens too like Arkham City with the villain mocking Batman. System Shock with the hopeless death animation. Sometimes the deaths can get elaborate and repetitive though like some horror games.
I have a 2TB ssd on my PC that is almost full with all kinds of retro games. All the way up to the PS3. It's crazy how good these games look on my 4k monitor compared to those tube TV's I played those games on back in the day. Lol
And old games are actually a lot more fun than a lot of the new ones. I haven't played a new title for a long time. Still going through my retro collection. 😁
The only thing is some old gave have very wonky camera movements and controls especially for first person like 007. Some have custom controls hacks too.
Most emulators have video rendering filters for this kind of concern; they have for a long time. SNES9X from more than a decade ago already implemented.
This is running Dolphin which can render 3D graphics at higher resolution. Then you can apply high res gesture packs. It ends up turning the game into a next gen game. That only really works with 3D games. snes and other 8-16 bit consoles still benefit from a CRT.
which doesnt apply to all games on said device. an example is that viewers vastly prefer the cleaner footage that comes off of streams generated by dolphin using slippi over wathing the native crt footage. unlike a single individual (yourself) generalizong the preference, this is a real life scenario with thousands of viewers on the same content, many of which is also very used to the crt as many are also players.
coming from a person who lugged a crt just for melee in college for years.
If you liked it and have access to a 3DS, you should play "A Link Between Worlds".
It uses a very similar overworld / "dark" world but a different story/time period. It's not quite a remake, has some cool mechanics, and is a spiritual successor. Definitely recommend it if you like LttP.
I need to get a new battery and backplate as my 3DS battery has bloated but I definitely will be playing a Link Between Worlds soon. Every retrospective I’ve watched since beating A Link to the Past recommends it as well.
Definitely check out Link’s Awakening when you get a chance! It has a really cool mechanical evolution beyond LttP: you have 2 equipment slots that you can swap independently! So instead of always having the sword + 1 item, you can have 2 different items with no sword!
That’s one thing I always like about handheld games during that era especially the Zelda and Mario Land games. They weren’t under the thumb of the original developers that created the series so they were willing to take more risks.
I read in some interviews about the development of A Link to the Past they wanted to allow the player to map any item to either Y or B but Miyamoto made them change it back to just allowing an item equipped to Y and the sword always being equipped.
Link’s Awakening is next on my list, I’ve just started it and I’m looking forward to the rest of it!
My entire life I’ve been avoiding Zelda games thinking they just weren’t for me. But when Nintendo added Link’s Awakening DX to Nintendo Online I decided to give it a try.
It’s just a lovely game. I love the graphics, the way it holds your hand a little more than earlier games, that feeling when the puzzles “click”, everything about it. It has turned me around on Zelda games and I intend to play the Oracle games when I get a chance.
Genuine question because I like retro games, what is the point of 4k here? It's blocky pixelated Mario kart, is there mods to update textures or something?
It looks absolutely stunning in 4K no pixels in sight with HD texture packs and 4K 3D renders. Now for older gen’s like SNES your CRT is a definite win.
It just looks clean. Lowpoly games benefit from running at high resolutions to a surprising degree. The better the art, the more it benefits from being shown with as little obfuscation as possible. There are texture packs and shaders available for popular old games, but even without them, it's often worth it to ramp up the resolution, even far beyond 4K. I've played some old games at ridiculous resolutions like 5k or more, eliminating even a hint of jagged edges. You can then add a touch of retro flair through scanline and bloom shaders.
I’m a bit in both worlds. I think that the split is at HD games. Up to SNES a CRT really makes things look as they were designed, but once you reach 3D games the low rez really feels like a limitation game designers had to deal with.
The textures themselves remain at their original resolution. But anything that was 3d rendered in the original console (like the karts and characters in Mario kart) will now have crisp lines. Additionally many emulators will support some form of texture scaling to make the original low texture stuff look marginally better. On a system like N64 it’s a toss up on looking significantly better. But on a PS3 emulator for example, since many environments are rendered in 3d, it’s a considerable improvement
I really liked a lot about the minish cap but the gacha game heart piece and the fact that you leave one of the three goddesses unhoused felt very antethitical to Zelda. Almost perfect otherwise.
why e-waste? I’m re-using things. Nothing is wasted. We are re-using controllers to play new games. The waste would be to buy each console. Instead I’m using my work computer to play. I gave my son my old computer and he’s using it now. Nothing is wasted.
takedowns are automated these days, either through full automation or paying low cost labor in places like India to just do google searches. Rockstar isn't "doing" anything here, aside from paying someone else to issue the takedowns. and the someone else doesn't know enough or care enough to apply logic that would cause all the other versions to get taken down too.
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