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Gaming Shout Thread


Sly Reflex
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Probably my favourite Nintendo machine without a doubt. PSOne catered more to my RPG tastes, but N64 brought so much to the table. Hybrid Heaven to Banjo to 1080 to Blast Corps etc etc 

A true multiplayer console too.

Still never played Smash 64 Bros though. Never heard of the series til Melee. Which as an aside, was the first time I ever heard of Ness, Marth, Roy and Samus.

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I got into the N64 very late in its lifespan, it must have been months if not only weeks before the PS2 came out. I had very few games for the system – OoT, Mario 64, Pokémon Stadium, Pokémon Snap, F-Zero X, Rayman 2, Beetle Adventure Racing (underrated!), Episode 1 Racer – but I loved all of them. I did buy some used games later but mostly just to have them in the collection and quickly try them out. But due to the late purchase and the limited amount of games played on it I never formed any kind of attachment to it, for lack of a better term. But the impact was still noticeable, even that late in its lifetime. There just wasn't something like Mario or Zelda on PS1 and Saturn.

 

My Nintendo highlight is and was the Gamecube, that machine had everything and I was there from almost Day One.

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I think it is the first time I've played a demo on the PS5. To me, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin was the first dud too. I did not enjoy any of it. The aesthetic is ugly, which for an FF is very strange. Albeit an outsourced spin-off. The level, character and enemy design could not have been more generic. The only distinctly FF monster - Bombs - were washed out visually too. The controls felt really off. I mostly stuck with swordsman. As the switching interfaces and stuff the game recommends does not feel intuitive at all. Ultimately beat this Griffon sub-boss first try, but what was being asked of me in-game til now wasn't cutting it against Garland. In contrast to other games of this type, after four tries, I didn't feel particularly inspired to re-learn the game just for this single boss fight.

 

Already deleted it. 

 

Meanwhile, had three game overs on the first level of Alex Kidd.? Loving it! I forgot how differently AK plays to most platformers of the time. He's floaty and hitboxes are not forgiving...

There's a nice feature, wherein pressing R2 gives you the original Master System graphics. I tried it, but decided to stick with the new sprite designs. Which ooze charm. Already fought and won against my first Rock-Paper-Scissors Boss Fight. Although it seems just as RNG as the originals.

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On 25/06/2021 at 17:25, mfnick said:

Just a FYI for JRPG fans. A new book which looks brilliant is now available from Bitmap. Been looking forward to this one for a long time! Just ordered my copy. 
 

https://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/products/a-guide-to-japanese-role-playing-games

Dammit. Sold out until October...?

 

Meanwhile, since I skipped from PS3 to PS5, I hadn't noticed this before. Does any game actually run immediately off the disc anymore? Three or four games in now, and it is becoming irritating.

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Nope, they all need to be installed. The disc is basically just a product key. Yea, can’t really just have a ‘quick go’ on anything you haven’t got installed and updated. Can be annoying but just got used to it now. 

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I've not got one of the next gen systems but I find the installing pretty annoying on PS4 because it's so slow. Can take close to an hour for some physical games. But I only buy about one physical a year now anyway. Makes it a lot easier to just go fully digital tho with that being a thing.

 

But it makes sense cause more and more of these games are being made in ways that a spinning disc would just be crap for data access.

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Yeah, I definitely don't miss the noises these older machines made when reading off a disc. Not to mention the loading times that were even longer than from last-gen HDDs. It's just something that was unavoidable with technical progress. I guess Nintendo found a bit of a middle ground but cartridges are so much more expensive than discs.

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My dilemma was I had a spare 20 minutes. So I thought to myself, let's have a quick look at one of your other new games. Those 20 minutes were then taken up by "queuing, copying and installing". My free time expired and I just turned off the console. Seems kind of pointless.

 

36 minutes ago, Nag said:

Installation is so much better in the longterm though...

I assume you're referring to load times etc Because the thing is, when you just put a disc in and play a game. When it is finished, you're done with it and that's that. Take the disc out and put a new one in. Now, with these installs. I have to delete the old game before moving on to the next. Otherwise it starts to take up space on the system. So in that respect, long term now adds hassle.

 

 

14 minutes ago, DANGERMAN said:

You've got to wait for the day 1 patch anyway ?

Oh yes, of course. I forgot they don't even bother to release fully working games anymore, either.

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9 minutes ago, Nag said:

Yet another tick in the reasons to go digital box...

How come? As long as my disc game is installed it updates automatically still. 
& if it’s a fresh install from the disc it checks, downloads & applies the update at the same time as it installs the game from the disc. So it may potentially be faster since it usually installs faster from disc than downloading. 

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7 minutes ago, Nag said:

you must be very busy.?

Yes?

For someone that has been relatively estranged from gaming for a while, trying to get back into it. All of this new, needless faffing about, doesn't help. It's a deep rooted thing from when I was a kid: Gaming is quick. Press power button, brief load screen and away you go.

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it's a shame but it's a tech problem rather than a cynicism one I think @OCH  Drives just can't keep up with the amount of data they need to move, or couldn't when Sony wanted to push Bluray. Then you've got that they need to last, you could potentially hit the speeds required but it increases the wear on the drive. Old harddrives weren't an amazing solution for it, particularly with slower cpus in consoles compared to pcs, but now we've got fancy NVMe drives and better cpus, it's not as bad

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Another point to balance out not going digital then. 

12 minutes ago, Nag said:

You can pre-load digital purchases (if it's a unreleased game) so it's ready from release time... on Xbox you can download games without even owning them, then just pop in the disc and you're ready to go, best of both worlds.?

 

@mfnick

Yep. Another thing that balances out going digital. 

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6 minutes ago, DANGERMAN said:

it's a shame but it's a tech problem rather than a cynicism one I think @OCH  Drives just can't keep up with the amount of data they need to move, or couldn't when Sony wanted to push Bluray. Then you've got that they need to last, you could potentially hit the speeds required but it increases the wear on the drive. Old harddrives weren't an amazing solution for it, particularly with slower cpus in consoles compared to pcs, but now we've got fancy NVMe drives and better cpus, it's not as bad

 

It is wild to see how much this has all changed since the PS3. I mean, I do recall MGS 4 had a lengthy install. They even had Snake onscreen smoking a cigarette the entire time to troll you too. But Most other games I had just didn't have that. I suppose, as @Maryokutai noted, where I only had the Switch before the PS5. I just assumed it was the same (pick up and go) as it had always been.

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Getting in the weeds a bit but the issue Och is best thought this way, disc drives have a very limited reading speed which isn't good for streaming in lots of data. This problem actually first started to poke its head during the PS3 era, remember installing MGS4? Whatever was going on in that game input/output wise they must have found that the game wouldn't perform right just reading off the disc, so they had us install every chapter as we went through

 

Now games are even more hungry for the data that's being read in on the fly, so installing is mandatory. With older systems like PS4 from what I understand is they would load chunks of data into RAM and have it ready as needed, now with PS5 the idea is to stream in smaller amounts but on a more regular basis cause the communication is much faster. But there's no way a spinning disc can really work in a system like that

 

edit you mention MGS4 in the post you just made so you do get the point here then lol

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Oh yeah, I totally get it. I just have to phase out the old mindset. Initially I thought it was just limited to the first few games I had bought. Skipping a gen, I missed out on when this became common place. 

 

That said, you just would have thought if they continued to use discs for gaming. As the data requirements began to increase, the disc drive tech would have progressed or innovated to keep up? As opposed to, as @mfnicksaid, discs just being product keys now.

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This is not something I'm close to informed on but I think it's next to impossible for a laser scanning a spinning disc to compete with storage like SSD or cartridges and how it uses electrical signals to get stuff. It's like a physical limit with the moving parts involved and even HDD has it, how there's a latency period between starting up spinning the disc and accessing what you want versus the more immediate access that SSDs can rely on. Like my understanding is it's like SSD can just point to the relevant storage address and get what it needs

 

Technically it's always been that way when you think of it, comparing something like the SNES originals of the Final Fantasy games to the ones that got ported to PS1, which had terrible load times. 

 

Also I'd be grateful if someone more expert could correct me on any of this, but that's my understanding.

 

eg as an example of limits, discs will literally explode if span too fast ?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_disc_drive#Limit

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