Emulation is the best. My ideal "retro collection" is a PC, a big-ass external drive, and a handful of oddball controllers for games that don't map well onto an Xbox pad.
Speaking of emulation, save states are a godsend and every autistic "purist" can suck my ass. I'm not wasting 20 minutes of my life every time there is a game over because the devs made some dumbass save system to artificially pad out the run time on a 2 hour PS1 game.
The very existence of "save points" in old games was a limitation imposed by the technology of the time. I don't run PS1 games at 320x240 resolution anymore, so why would I limit myself to (virtual) memory cards just to prove that I'm getting the authentic h4rdc0r3 Bubsy 3D experience?
Galaxy was making a game based entirely on the secret levels of Sunshine with forced Wiimoting. I thought Galaxy 2 was a better game.
I agree. Having said that, retrofags have turned physical copies of games, particularly on Nintendo consoles, into investments. I bought Pikmin 3 for the Wii U for $60 and never got around to playing it. I was able to sell it to some fag for $200 a couple years later because it was factory sealed and Pikmin 3 was out of print. It’s not enough for a full time job but when I decide to sell off my physical copies of Switch games I bet I can make a profit off of it overall. Nothing to get rich over but I can’t say that I wasted my money, which can’t be said for many hobbies.
You can apply this statement to every video game out there. Just press the right buttons, bro. Yeah, no shit? As opposed to what, pressing the wrong buttons?
Save states are a bit of a double-edged sword, you can essentially "fix" the game by making your own save points or overcoming bad design, but you also risk just cheesing the game. You can limit yourself but it's hard not to just brute force everything with saves.
I keep thinking you hit the peak and you keep topping yourself
Wait, is that how you've been playing Dark Souls?
Yeah, the only physical game I still have is Megaman Legends 2 because I realized it was actually worth something to autistic hoarders. Really need to get around to putting it up on eBay or something.
Who emulates a game that had a PC re-release five years ago that removed the 30 FPS cap? Only an absolute madman would even contemplate such a thing.
It's really weird that the vast majority of games nowadays don't have a proper save feature that allows you to save right where you want to.
And even at that, I don't know just how limited a save feature would have to be to need save points as opposed to save anywhere. Like in a tile-based RPG, surely a save point would just need one byte to say "when the player loads the game, stick them here, at save point #27" as opposed to like three bytes that'd be like "when the player loads the game, stick them here, on screen 54, X coordinate 127, Y coordinate 233"? Dragon Quest 3, in 1988, had 8,192 bytes of battery-backed SRAM. Surely they could have spared two extra bytes to map coordinates in a save file.
Don't forget that you'd also need to store game state as well as player location. If you have a very limited number of save locations known to the developers ahead of time, it's much easier to store that in the ROM of the disc or cartridge and just reference it in the actual save file.
If I remember, you couldn't change DS2 face data after the fact though, because it wouldn't write it to the save file?
Was that so? I'm probably misremembering then. Definitely have DS1 face data tho as I remember using it to recreate my best PTDE characters in the remaster.
The only difference I can think of in save data between save anywhere vs. save points would be coordinates. Saving would just entail a command like "poll the exact coordinates of the player, then record them here", which should only take three bytes total in a 2D game. One for which map you're on, one for X, and one for Y. Of course, I'm thinking about a rudimentary one for, say, a NES RPG with invisible random encounters like Dragon Quest. If you're tight on data, you could just establish every ingress of a map as a save point, and look that up to record your location.
I assumed there would be a mod for that... a PS3 disc can only hold like 50GB of data so it's understandable they'd pad it with artificial difficulty, no reason you have to play it that way nowadays though.
cbf to research but I wouldn't be surprised if most rpgs on old Japanese computers had restricted save systems too, even though they could afford the space.
Like so many other lazy and incompetent gook developers, they were still tying physics and various other calculations directly to the framerate more than a decade after western developers realized that was a bad idea. There was a lot more to it than just removing an arbitrary limiter.
I won't usually get into ultra detailed customization options, but I give my character a cartoonish massive giga chad chin whenever I can.
That was sort of the big thing for me is that the amount of activities you would actually do while outside of the car were limited to basic platforming shit which left a lot to be desired.
That's sort of become me with playing Euro/American Truck Simulator. Driving around aimlessly and stopping at rest stops to fill up on gas provides a simple pleasure of simulating a road trip without anything crazy you would see in a more exciting game. The feeling of pretending to hang your arm out the window and listening to the radio brings a sort of pleasure that's hard to explain.
Save states let me learn that you can kill the Magi Master at the top of Fanatic's Tower in FF6. Had a friend who was playing (I was kinda guiding him) and I tell him about the boss, so he thinks he's ready, he get into the fight and then we decide we're hungry; so he save states (not using any in game saves) and we go get food. Come back and he starts fighting, manages to deplete the boss's HP and get wiped out by Ultima, I laugh, because of course I can. Then he tells me, he's locked in because of save states, and what the fuck can he do. I merely postulated, that if he could drain the boss's MP, the boss should be empty and not able to cast Ultima when it dies. I point out that Rasp and Osmose drain the boss's like 50,000 MP, so this is gonna take a while. I'm not watching, but my friend yells WTF, I turn to see the info say Ultima, but then the boss dies. Friend asked if I knew that, told him no, figured he'd have to knock the boss down the old fashioned way once his MP is out.
