Playing Old Games For the First Time - Give a Short Review of Some 10+ Year Old Game You Played For the First Time

[Wesker]

Over the summer, I got heavy into the SNK fighters. Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting and King of Fighters. I never played them at release but for months I went through them in chronological order. I got burnt out and stopped in KOF 2003.

I wish I had played these when they originally came out, because in many ways I see them as superior to their competitors at the time, especially Street Fighter. Although SNK didn't market much over the West until Maximum Impact, which is why it was the highest selling game over here up until that point.

I'm going to get back into it tomorrow. The third generation games have sprites that look so good they almost look like 3D models. I still have yet to pick up KOF15 since I'm waiting for the DLC run to complete and I can buy the game cheap.

 

[Girl Named Sandoz]

The third generation games have sprites that look so good they almost look like 3D models.

because they essentially are. the way they created them was to make 3d models and animations and then basically trace over them.
https://kofaniv.snk-corp.co.jp/english/info/15th_anniv/2d_dot/creation/index.php

did you play 2002 um? best kof imo

 

[Wesker]

because they essentially are. the way they created them was to make 3d models and animations and then basically trace over them.
https://kofaniv.snk-corp.co.jp/english/info/15th_anniv/2d_dot/creation/index.php

did you play 2002 um? best kof imo

Yeah, I have it. I tend to like 98 um more, but 02 um is right there. That whole saga was weird, but I like it. I liked the darker tone of it, but Krizalid can fuck off. IMO the hardest boss up to that point.

I should of figured they did that with the sprites. They gotta be the highest quality sprites ever done in a fighting game. I wish all these games stayed with them, but from a production standpoint I understand why. At least they stuck with it most of the franchise's life.

I've been thinking of getting those Limited Run physical copies of the KOF/FF/AOF games for PS4 even though I have them all digital.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

I wish I had played these when they originally came out, because in many ways I see them as superior to their competitors at the time, especially Street Fighter. Although SNK didn't market much over the West until Maximum Impact, which is why it was the highest selling game over here up until that point.

They were popular in arcades and among fighting game people in the west before MI. People have been sperging about KOF98 since it came out and there were quite a few machines with it that could be found in really odd places. On consoles though... I just looked it up and saw that it was released on PS1 in 1999, can't remember ever knowing that, so marketing for consoles didn't seem like a priority.

 

[Stasi]

Rygar on the PS2. Not sure how popular it was back in the day but I never hear anyone talk about it so think it qualifies as a hidden gem these days. Very good action adventure game IMO and worth playing. Looks great too for an early PS2 game, some of the scenery is so impressive you end up standing around a bit just to aprreciate the scene.

I had massive God of War vibes playing it so went and looked up release dates and this game predates GoW by a good 3 years. I am convinced this was at least in part responsible for GoW and feels like they borrowed heavily from Rygar. The ancient Greek setting you can say is a coincidence but the weapon style, combat, feel of the platforming, upgrades and even some of the camera angles are too much to be a coincidence.

 

[Fag Albert]

Rygar on the PS2. Not sure how popular it was back in the day but I never hear anyone talk about it so think it qualifies as a hidden gem these days. Very good action adventure game IMO and worth playing. Looks great too for an early PS2 game, some of the scenery is so impressive you end up standing around a bit just to aprreciate the scene.

I had massive God of War vibes playing it so went and looked up release dates and this game predates GoW by a good 3 years. I am convinced this was at least in part responsible for GoW and feels like they borrowed heavily from Rygar. The ancient Greek setting you can say is a coincidence but the weapon style, combat, feel of the platforming, upgrades and even some of the camera angles are too much to be a coincidence.

This is all shooting from the hip, but I wouldn't be shocked if GoW took inspiration. Rygar as a series dates all the way back to the 80's. Someone who liked throwing around the chained buzzsaw in the arcades might've looked to its more 3d counterpart 16 or so years later. I do remember Rygar ps2 being pretty well received at the time.

 

[Guaymallen]

i recently tried Duke Nukem 3D for the first time, and as someone who's always been a huge fan of the old Doom games and the gynormous amount of mods available for the GZDoom source port, man was this a fantastic game to play, i don't even get how i haven't played it before, the map design is impeccable (except for some sections in the Space Station chapter that i absolutely loathe), the gunplay is solid enough for a 90s game, the graphics are strangely appealing and just everything works, so many interesting level design ideas that you can feel how it influenced later games, and overall this game left me wanting more by the time i finished it, even with the absolute assblast that some of it's later levels are (Derelict is impressive but it's extremely trash).

My only big complaint so far is the source port situation, in a quick summary:
You could play the game in it's original form via DOSBox, but it's a retardedly janky way to play it, so you could get the Megaton Edition, which works fine enough and it's good, but for some reason, it's gone!
In it's place you can now only get the 20th Anniversary World Tour Edition, which has "improved graphics", a.k.a, horribly upscaled sprites and the most fake-looking, plastic-looking, art-style clashing lighting update possible. So, like a good GZDoom fanboy, i ended up playing it through the Raze source port, which has such a gigantic list of improvements and updates i can't even begin to list them all.
HIGHLY recommend the Raze source port for Build Engine games.

 

[Guaymallen]

Rygar on the PS2. Not sure how popular it was back in the day but I never hear anyone talk about it so think it qualifies as a hidden gem these days. Very good action adventure game IMO and worth playing. Looks great too for an early PS2 game, some of the scenery is so impressive you end up standing around a bit just to aprreciate the scene.

I had massive God of War vibes playing it so went and looked up release dates and this game predates GoW by a good 3 years. I am convinced this was at least in part responsible for GoW and feels like they borrowed heavily from Rygar. The ancient Greek setting you can say is a coincidence but the weapon style, combat, feel of the platforming, upgrades and even some of the camera angles are too much to be a coincidence.

Man, it's so interesting how many good IPs the PS2 generation had on at the same time, wish we kept more of these around instead of reducing it to like, 4 series per company.

 

[The Ugly One]

PS2 was the sweet spot where the machine was powerful enough to easily make games that ran at 30 fps to 60 fps while still looking pretty, but you could still make money with under 1 million sales. That's just gone now.

I've been playing SiN, which came out about the same time as Half-Life. This is a first-person shooter set in a cyberpunk dystopia. You play as Blade, a badass dude with a lot of guns who needs to kill all the bad guys and save the city from an evil corporation getting rich off mutagenic drugs.

Like Half-Life, it belongs to the post-Goldeneye batch of late 1990s first-person shooters that has realistic, mission-based levels and a cinematic flair. Combat is reasonably challenging - you even manually reload your weapons. Of course, it's still a Quake II engine game from the era before hardware T&L, so you won't face more than 3 or 4 enemies at once.

Overall, this is a very good game. The pacing is quite good, the voice acting is good, the action is good, and outside of a few instances of 90s bullshit (i.e. instant failure stealth), it's held up well. The AI is more advanced than Quake II, and there's location-based hit detection, so it definitely feels a little more modern. One thing that makes it still worth playing is it's the kind of lengthy, deep single-player campaign you just don't see any more.

This series is dead now, since its creator got acquired by the now-defunct MumboJumbo Games. You can get it for $2.49 on GoG (discounted from $10), and it's well worth the low price. Even at $10, I'd still recommend it. I've paid far more for games that weren't half this good.

SiN 1 Longplay (steam edition)

SiN 1 Long play (steam edition)My motivation for creating this long play was primarily because one did not exist. Nor were there any other videos of this qui...

www.youtube.com

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

A really cool thing about SiN was the branching paths, you won't be able to see all the levels on one playthrough. You could also influence future levels by doing certain things. It had a lot of little neat ideas not seen at the time, like how bullets would ricochet off certain materials, the pain skins, looting armor from the enemies and the quality of the armor depends on where they got shot. A bullet proof vest from someone that took a lot of center mass damage would be almost depleted, an enemy that died from a head shot will have pristine body armor. Head shot someone to death and their won't be much of a helmet to pick up. Really fun stuff and I also think it's worth playing today, everyone that likes first person shooter and wobbly vertex animation should check it out.

I liked it more than Half-Life at the time even if the original release was quite buggy. (the almost-day-one patch was ~31MB which was a lot to download using a modem. But the no-cd crack was significantly smaller and fixed the most disastrous issue.)

 

[The Ugly One]

The bad guys also go run and hide behind things, and pop in and out of doorways. The vertex wobble on the models is really something, they must be doing all the math in integer space.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

The vertex wobble on the models is really something, they must be doing all the math in integer space.

It's frame animation in 3D which is a weird thing. The models have static "frames" and the game is just LERPing vertex positions between one animation frame to the next. Straight path. I think they were 10-15fps animations or something like that so running it at 60-90fps(CRT era) meant a lot of warping. It was a memory vs CPU cost thing. Consoles had a pretty clever thing going for them with segmented "capsules" that made up the body of an animated object. Look at RE, Tomb Raider, Wave Race, MGS and they're all made up of intersecting chunks. If they didn't do that a character raising their arms above the head would result in a deformed torso, they couldn't put weights on vertices to control how they deform. Well, they could, it was just not feasible on a PSX.

And of course it was integer, there was much less floating point used than people believe even through the PS2/Xbox generation. If floating point was absolutely necessary there were some really dirty tricks in assembly to truncate it into ints to avoid the cost of type conversion, while losing some precision of course. But that's how games are/were made, it's a neatly stacked ratatouille of cheating, tricks and hacks. Things were so fun back then.

 

[The Ugly One]

The main thing is the wobble looks like truncation error to me because of how irregular they are - which suggests ints. IIRC the Quake Engine stores its model vertices as chars, but I've never looked at QII source code.

Floating-point math was expensive BITD. The PS1 did pretty much everything in fixed-point. So did the N64, once you realized you should be sending pretty much all geometry manipulation through the GPU (or whatever it is they called it, RDP I think).

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

The main thing is the wobble looks like truncation error to me because of how irregular they are - which suggests ints. IIRC the Quake Engine stores its model vertices as chars, but I've never looked at QII source code.

Floating-point math was expensive BITD. The PS1 did pretty much everything in fixed-point. So did the N64, once you realized you should be sending pretty much all geometry manipulation through the GPU (or whatever it is they called it, RDP I think).

PS1 did not have support for floating point in hardware, anything FP-like would be fixed point.

The issue with Q1/Q2 engine games and their wobbly models was that the vertices were traveling in a straight path to their next point of the next frame of animation. That's why it looks odd, they do not take into account the shape of the movement of a rotation, they just travel straight to their next position. At 320x240 SW this wasn't a problem.

 

[The Ugly One]

Q1 doesn't interpolate.

I'll have to look at the MD2 files (cant , but to me it looks like there are far too many wobbles for each one to be between a frame, in particlar as weapons wave around. But it doesn't really matter.

 

[Womble of Wimbledon]

I want to play through Resident Evil 1 but I need to be in the right headspace because, fuck that game moves slow. And I can handle slow games, I played through the original King's Field and loved it, but the combination of low ammo, bullet-sponge enemies and dying in like 3 bites is testing my persistence to its limit

 

[Neet Tokusatsu]

Started the original Darksiders 2 a few weeks ago, the game that pretty made me to create a Steam accoutnt all the way back to the early 2010's, it's probably the best action/adventure game i've ever played, it is what i've always wanted, a 3D Zelda with more focus on combat, lots of loot and gear to costumize your character, meaningful side-quest that give extra dungeons and bosses rather than being shitty fetchquests, it is very close to what i would consider a perfect game... if it wasn't for the constant crashes. There's nothing worse than being invested and having a good time playing a game you actually like and for whatever reason the game decides to crash and kick you back to desktop.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Q1 doesn't interpolate.

I'll have to look at the MD2 files (cant , but to me it looks like there are far too many wobbles for each one to be between a frame, in particlar as weapons wave around. But it doesn't really matter.

Animated at 10fps, how would one frame of vertex animation move the vertices into the place of the next frame without some kind of interpolation between vertex positions? How would it tween between frames of animation?

 

[The Ugly One]

Animated at 10fps, how would one frame of vertex animation move the vertices into the place of the next frame without some kind of interpolation between vertex positions? How would it tween between frames of animation?

The answer is, it doesn't. Quake MD1 models don't move smoothly at all. They animate like Doom sprites, but in 3D. IIRC, one of the more popular source ports adds vertex interpolation as an option, but the original game doesn't do that.

The reason I'm saying truncation error can be illustrated below. I wrote some C code to interpolate between 1 and 20 using 8-bit ints. You can see that not each step has the same size, as it would if I were doing an accurate linear interpolation. You would perceive this on screen as a wobble. Moreover, if I had a bunch of points I were interpolating this way, different points would have unevenness at different steps of the interpolation, resulting in the entire model wobbling in an irregular way.

I'm not 100% certain something like this is happening with QII animations, but the visual artifacts are consistent with this.



Anyway, I finished SiN. I kind of wore out at the end and played the last 3 levels on god mode, but this is really a very well-written game. Lots of games today have worse voice acting and writing. It's really too bad this series is dead.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

The answer is, it doesn't. Quake MD1 models don't move smoothly at all. They animate like Doom sprites, but in 3D. IIRC, one of the more popular source ports adds vertex interpolation as an option, but the original game doesn't do that.

The reason I'm saying truncation error can be illustrated below. I wrote some C code to interpolate between 1 and 20 using 8-bit ints. You can see that not each step has the same size, as it would if I were doing an accurate linear interpolation. You would perceive this on screen as a wobble. Moreover, if I had a bunch of points I were interpolating this way, different points would have unevenness at different steps of the interpolation, resulting in the entire model wobbling in an irregular way.

I'm not 100% certain something like this is happening with QII animations, but the visual artifacts are consistent with this.

View attachment 4157643

Anyway, I finished SiN. I kind of wore out at the end and played the last 3 levels on god mode, but this is really a very well-written game. Lots of games today have worse voice acting and writing. It's really too bad this series is dead.

Oh, you're right about Q1, I only ever played it in software ages ago* and I lump it into Q1/Q2 because I didn't see much of change other than colored lighting, breakable geometry and transparent surfaces. And you mentioned looking into MD2, so I got it a bit mixed up because I don't pay attention.

Q2 is 100% interpolated animations, I took a minute to look at the source code and and the function GL_DrawAliasFrameLerp with the comment "interpolates between two frames and origins" uses the function "GL_LerpVerts" so it is 100% interpolated animations. These are not actual OpenGL functions but written for the hardware accelerated version of Quake 2, the software version is in assembly...

Excessive warping would likely be to game programming tricks, there's a 4096 entry LUT(in Q2) for dot products along with a chain of mixing chars, shorts, ints and floats then pushing it to the graphics accelerator. From the look of it the vertices would likely be snapping around in a point cloud of dubious precision.

*correction: some multiplayer last year when the new thing got on Gamepass.