Console specific audio/video flaws that drive you nuts.
Console specific audio/video flaws that drive you nuts.
I'm starting this off right. I've always hated that damn sprite flickering issue countless NES games have. I'd love to see so many of these games ported to handhelds, with absolutely everything kept the same, except with no flickering sprites. Unfortunately this issue remains intact on compilation games like Megaman Anniversary Collection.
sega master system is far worse than nes.
i hated slowdown in snes games. i never minded it in newer games (ps2, xbox, etc) unless it was really, really noticeable. more often than not if a game wasn't "slowed down" it made it look too "artificial" (?). maybe that's not the right word. think of it as a tv show recorded on video vs. a tv show recorded on film. you can tell the difference in framerate (film is slower than video) and it just doesn't look as "smooth." sometimes i thought this put the game at an advantage if it were trying to be cinematic in nature (e.g. metal gear solid 2, shadow of the colossus, etc).
man i really love parenthetical statements tonight...
i hated slowdown in snes games. i never minded it in newer games (ps2, xbox, etc) unless it was really, really noticeable. more often than not if a game wasn't "slowed down" it made it look too "artificial" (?). maybe that's not the right word. think of it as a tv show recorded on video vs. a tv show recorded on film. you can tell the difference in framerate (film is slower than video) and it just doesn't look as "smooth." sometimes i thought this put the game at an advantage if it were trying to be cinematic in nature (e.g. metal gear solid 2, shadow of the colossus, etc).
man i really love parenthetical statements tonight...
Well, the flicker was because there were too many sprites and it had to make some disappear to allow others to appear. The slowdown was the CPU being overwhelmed with collision detection code. Either way, it was that companies pushed the system too far or with badly programmed code. Konami was good at making sprites flicker in and out at consistent rates to allow more on screen at a time. Look at the Contra games. Konami also managed the collision detection code very well because their games rarely slowed down. Then look at Natsume's Shadow of the Ninja. On the final level you are moving up a vertical shaft and there are "archers" on ledges shooting at you. The game flickers madly and slows to a crawl. It's the only reason you can survive the climb, but it is frustrating.
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Pullmyfinger
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Most of the compilation packages run on emulators and you either choose to emulate accurately or you don't. If they fudged accuracy to get the sprites to stop flickering what else would they blast in the process?
Me, I hate the 3-D blur effect on the PS2. It seems to happen when the PS2 is being overwhelmed by polygons and rather than cut the framerate they blur the polygons. It looks like I'm playing the game without my glasses.
Me, I hate the 3-D blur effect on the PS2. It seems to happen when the PS2 is being overwhelmed by polygons and rather than cut the framerate they blur the polygons. It looks like I'm playing the game without my glasses.
I'm aware that they use emulators. I'm just saying it would be nice if a company would take it's own NES titles, extract all the graphics and rebuild them into a new, more optimized engine. The would look the same, but exhibit none of the old flaws or glitches. The chiptune music could be professionally recorded and cleaned up from the source hardware, and encoded to a streamed format. After that, they would just have to reconstruct enemy AI and physics and such, which shouldnt be too hard because back then those aspects were never very advanced.Perseid wrote:Most of the compilation packages run on emulators and you either choose to emulate accurately or you don't. If they fudged accuracy to get the sprites to stop flickering what else would they blast in the process?
Very good point. I got tired of that effect after just a couple games, but there seem to be hundreds on PS2 that abuse that feature. I'm assuming the graphics CPU of PS2 has that effect practically hardcoded in the framebuffer as a sort of failsafe for when it cant keep an optimal rate otherwise.Me, I hate the 3-D blur effect on the PS2. It seems to happen when the PS2 is being overwhelmed by polygons and rather than cut the framerate they blur the polygons. It looks like I'm playing the game without my glasses.
The only game that had a pretty nice motion blur for when the rates dropped was Colossus. That game didn't simply blend frames back to back. It truly blended the graphics along their paths of motion. That effect is heavily used on modern blockbuster movies like Transformers, and seeing it actually processed in realtime in a game just blew me away.
The flicker did drive me absolutely nuts sometimes. It seemed like it always happened in places where frequent deaths were common-- "Not only are you dead, but I'm going to flicker at you, too."
I agree that it wouldn't take much work to get rid of the flicker, but from a business perspective it does often make more sense to do only the work you must. Although, in this case it seems like the opposite is true: Because I would expect quality ports from companies that took the time to fix flicker and whatnot, I would be more likely to buy ports from those companies.
I agree that it wouldn't take much work to get rid of the flicker, but from a business perspective it does often make more sense to do only the work you must. Although, in this case it seems like the opposite is true: Because I would expect quality ports from companies that took the time to fix flicker and whatnot, I would be more likely to buy ports from those companies.