The Sony PlayStation 1 and the Nintendo 64 generation was one of the most interesting era's in history. Both were early adopters of 3d technology, but their respective hardware architectures were vastly different from each other. The N64 and PS1 handled 3d and their games in different ways, and both systems limitations are ultimately what allowed for developers to come up with some of the very best video games ever made. In today's episode we take a closer look and what these limitations are and how ultimately, they became part of the fabric that defined these systems to so many fans around the world. Please Enjoy!
TimeStamps:
00:00 - 01:38 - Intro
01:39 - 13:10 - How developers worked around the limits of the N64 and PS1
13:11 - 14:52 - Outro
Social Media Links :
► X : x.com/ModernVintageG
► Threads : threads.net/ModernVintageGamer
► Facebook : / modernvintagegamer
► IG : / modernvintagegamer
► BandCamp : modernvintagegamer.bandcamp.com/
#PS1 #N64
Technical limitations forced creativity in graphics and music compositions.
And led to the horrible working conditions developers find themselves in today
@jcdenton4110 that wouldn't have anything to do with limitations in hardware. Unrealistic sales expectations and yearly release due dates especially for sports games causes horrible work conditions.
@@RubyRose23328 Gonna need some citations, captain.
@jcdenton4110 eh, crunch was a huge part of the most iconic games throughout the 90s and 2000s, especially in japan. If you asked shigeru miyamoto, a big part of the success of his games is the "crunch" they went through. It takes dedication to create a timeless masterpiece. If anything, the unwillingness of modern devs to do this is resulting in very watered down middling games. Game development is a 9-5 for ucla comp sci grads and not for artists anymore. Imagine a game like chrono trigger and halo and how a few months of crunch resulted in games that touched people and the people that made those games are immortalized. We can all go for a few months without sleep. Anyone that's had a baby knows that.
@@alanlee67 People who think "crunch" was some kind of big awful thing back in the day are just showing everyone they weren't alive back then. Many old games were created because the dudes making them wanted to. If you look at the old industry through a dumbed down modern lens, it looks like crunch. Lot of those old dudes like Carmack slaved away because they wanted to - it wasn't a soulless 9 to 5 industry then like it is now. I'll also add - nothing great comes easy. Only a child thinks it does.
PS1 era: doing more with less. PS5 era : doing less with more.
Kinda your own fault for locking yourself to one platform. The one with the least 1st party output this generation, at that.
This is why ps1 ff games has the best style. And nostalgia has almost nothing to do with this
@@dikchez8090First party games have nothing to do with the quality of technology. The thumbnail showcases MGS1 and Banjo Kazooi, neither of which were 1st party releases on their platforms. Also I think anyone would agreed “Starfield”, a first party game from Microsoft, is a greater example of “doing less with more” than any modern video game because it not only relies on the same game engine from the 7th console generation but it’s some of the most outdated game mechanics , horrendous load screens and poor optimization since CyberPunk2077. You’re just trying to start a console war in the comments even though 1st party games have literally nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Playstation is STILL home of console gaming, regardless of 1st party output 💯
@@dikchez8090 delusional xbot detected
The developers of Crash Bandicoot talking about how they had to build such large levels with the system limitations. It was insane, the creativity.
Let me tell you something an an electrical engineer that has worked in software development and video games for the last 30 years. The challenge was the fun part of it, there is no challenge anymore. It's just libraries and abstractions now. You're not going to see any improvement that is really noticeable in the future. We have video now that is photo-realistic, now it's just down to creativity which has moved away from engineers to artists, and our artists are crap and upper management believes everybody wants to see photo-realistic anyhow, so even very talented and creative artists, they are pushed aside. Welcome to corporate America.
@@fuzzywzhe Everyone knows this is bs. Next step is real time simulations and for that we need thousand times more power.
Late 90s to early 2000s was the peak of gaming innovation. The PS3/360 era would begin the graphics innovation era that we are still in today. All innovations are visual now.
that depends on where you look, honestly. some would argue that indies are still innovating or are at least remixing concepts in new and novel ways. it's not as if innovation doesn't happen at all, it's just not happening as quickly anymore.
The 6th generation is also when game quality started to go down. Marketing, business decisions, bells and whistles, with hand holding on top. All that has robbed games of what made them what they are - gameplay and exploration. NDS has saved that generation for me.
Not even visual, at least in the art style.
@@logandunlap9156 there is A LOT of creativity in the indie scene. I definitely agree with you on them remixing ideas in creative ways. And we have seen some gameplay innovations through indie games particularly with physics games introduced in the early 2010s as well as casual games like candy crush (yeah, really). The mostly play indie games these days as well as first party exclusives from Sony and Nintendo (with the occasional Capcom and square enix game thrown in). But every game today indie or not is essentially some variation of Mario 64, Zelda 1/3/4, super Metroid, MGS, dragon quest/final fantasy, doom, Mario franchise, half life 1/2, resident evil 4, and GTA 3. There are other influential games of course. Even ones that came out in the 6th gen like COD MW, AC 2, Batman Arkham, Far cry, uncharted 2, GTA IV, and TLOU. But those games are more minor leaps forward. If Indie games had a bigger budget I suspect we’d continue to see innovation like before. Even some of the most innovative games to come out in the last decade have been indie projects like DayZ.
There aren't going to be any more innovations. You can't do much with having photorealistic, and I don't care what people say, you can't process over 90 FPS.
pros of n64:- Cartridges cons of n64:- Cartridges
Nearly 30 years later, I am really appreciating the cartridge format, as they physically hold up so much better than CDs. My PS1's laser is dying, the discs I have bought inevitably have scratches on them, and oftentimes I have to sit there while the disc skips or loads excessively. With N64 carts, you can buy some that are incredibly beat up, but work flawlessly and have no appreciable degradation since the 90s.
@@petemiller2598pretty much except some people nasty and you have to give them a good cleaning. Always have to have some 90%+ alcohol when buying some used carts
@@petemiller2598 additionally with carts, if the ROM is corrupted, you can easily re-flash the ROM onto the cart!
Ah, this is the sad thing, Nintendo approached Sony about using their CD Hardware for their next console (there is even prototype hardware), gave them the idea and ambition and the Playstation was born...ended up capturing quite a bit of Nintendo's videogame market for a while too...but there is no stopping those guys!
Pros of N64: you could re-write the microcode and fully own the engine. Cons of n64: you need a god-tier assembly writer to do that. Pros of PSX: There was a standard C library that any competent C programmer could make use of with a bit of reading. cons of psx: It was very easy to shoot yourself in the foot and no one really knew 3d at that point or how to order rendering.
"Doing more with less" is a lost art now.
I feel like the switch fills that niche nowadays somewhat. As nintendo rely on solid artstyle rather than graphical horsepower. But then people still complain about framerates and jaggies. I'm still impressed what people are able to get out of a SOC that was released in 2015 and is still downclocked from it's orignal TV streaming box origins. I've put more hours into my switch than I have my stupid expensive gaming pc, both are hooked up to the same TV. I still hate nintendo as a company though.
Eh, not really? Nintendo 64 Modding shows just how underutilized that hardware is. One of the coolest projects for it was the Portal demake. It was pretty much a 1:1 remake with functional portals and physics engine. There are a lot of retro inspired indie games that get close to how PS1, Saturn and N64 looked like. You won't find this in AAA.
@@_NekOz That "You won't find this in AAA." is the problem.
@@Broken_Yugo I don't really think of it as a problem as I mostly buy from Indies nowadays. AAA will never be the same due to how much money there is in it now. Art never meshes well with a profit first mindset. I don't even have a lack of games to play either, got a massive backlog of indie games.
Thats why I loved the old days of the Demo Scene
I don’t think we’ve ever seen two competing machines that were so dramatically different! I’ve always been fascinated by how developers overcame the limitations of 16-bit consoles and earlier, so hadn’t even thought much about these consoles.
Ah come on, N64 wasn't as different from PS1 compared to the massive difference between the Wii or Switch to the playstation or Xbox, both of which are now a locked down PC.
Simple. They released terrible games whether they could run on the system or not. SNES couldnt run Street Fighter Alpha but they released it anyway. Playstation not powerful enough for proper Marvel vs Capcom? Release it anyway
The 7th Generation was arguably pretty similar to this. The Xbox 360 was kind of the only “normal” baseline console of that generation from a hardware perspective. The Wii was, well, the Wii - while the PS3 actually had a lot of weird stuff going on under the hood with its cell processor. That made it really powerful if used correctly, but also a lot harder to develop for and it made it much more difficult to port games over from the 360, which means that even though it was a more powerful console, third party multiplatform games tended to look and run worse on PlayStation. The first party exclusives though like Uncharted, Last of Us, God of War and Killzone were all among the best looking games of that generation and leaps beyond anything the 360 could run. But yeah, that’s unfortunately a good example of why the hardware differences ended up being a negative thing for that generation. While the PS1 and N64 era had devs thinking outside the box to create a good or unique experience on both consoles - often we just ended up with games being good on 360, slightly worse on the PS3 (or sometimes a lot worse), and often not releasing at all on Wii because of the hardware limitations - and of course, you could be assured that if a multiplat game did come to the Wii, it would definitely be the worst way to play it by far. Sony and especially Nintendo really ended up carried that generation by their first party games. Not necessarily a bad thing though, as those first party Sony and Nintendo games were some of the best games of all time. *One thing I will say though is that, while the state of Wii ports of games was more frustrating as a kid that only owned a Wii for a time, going back as an adult years later is kind of an interesting experience. For me, the experience has changed from “this sucks” to “how the hell did they get this to work on the Wii?”. It’s actually kind of cool to see the design choices they made to get PS3/360 games to run on such underpowered hardware. It’s almost like seeing a PS2 port of games that would’ve never come out on a PS2.
@@ling8956imagine seething this much about ppl preferring retro games lol. Your ps5 has no games other than movieslop
This was the norm before the console's 6th (PS4) generation, though. All the consoles had different architecture and that's why multiplatform games were very rare. Most companies back then would just stick with only one platform for an entire generation.
“Creativity is not thinking outside the box. It’s setting the box on fire and trying to find a way out” - One of my favorite quotes about limitations breeding creativity.
but by whooooo
@@cluckendip"trust me bro" - the brosiah
Metal Gear Solid was absolutely insane how far ahead of it's time it was. Kojima tried to do a full cinematic experience at the earliest possible time and pulled it off. The characters lips may not move but the story telling and cinematics and everything being rendered in real time was amazing. It's also the first game that I recall having dozens of hours of fully voiced dialogue, so much that it required 2 discs just for the sound files alone.
And you actually got to PLAY Metal Gear Solid 1. A lot of Kojima's later efforts had you watching 45 minutes of cutscenes just to then get to play for 10 minutes and then watch another 45 minutes of cutscenes. LOL!
I've never actually played MGS1 (yet) but I have seen a couple of videos here and there. From the little I've seen, the voice acting, cinematic music and camera angles, it legit sounds and feels like a movie. The sound production quality far outweighs the actual graphics, limited as they were.
Every game was then judged to not be as good as metal gear solid, before it came out me and my mates played the tits off the demo, was mind blowing!
MGS is extremely overrated in both story and gameplay
To this day it’s probably my favorite game, I play it annually and love the fact the cut scenes are long enough to just chill and watch for a nice little break between playing.
There is a fairly well-known paradox in creative arts that says sometimes boundaries, restrictions, and other limitations on what you can do or use actually leads to more creativity. When you are not overwhelmed by choice it can lead to lateral thinking, unconventional solutions you'd never bother with if you could just waste resources, collaborations with people outside your usual group, etc. Now in gaming, it just seems to be "get the game out and we'll push a bunch of updates later. By that time, it is the sucker consumer's problem."
Facts. The ability to force an update, often on release day, hurt gaming more than microtransactions bc they no longer had to ship a working product.
Now if only we could do the same with our government's reckless spending...
Today is a mix of cost vs profit as their constraint unless its indie, then its "how do I stand out amongst the sea of copy-paste algorithmic copycats" (which then becomes "how do I make sure the clones that come after me aren't just taking me for a ride."). I would argue that in a sea of "homebrew" it comes down to marketing and just making something fun for yourself. Too often are the community making generalizations over these things. Don't get me wrong, there are just as many reasons things COULD be done right as they are done WRONG. Armchair developers (I'm guilty of this too) constantly attack the development team about: cheaters, content, bugs and honestly every little nitpick under the sun. Seriously, it's hard to do this stuff right guys. Major studios SHOULD have it down but we forget cost vs profit plays so heavily into the corporate sphere that we as the community lose sight of making the game. If you want the industry to change, you need to vote with your wallet (NOTE: not a political statement). Big publishers that are publicly held are beholden to stockholders. Indies are beholden to the court of public opinion. If you watch this YT vid and come away with "it's so much better back then", there are just as many sucky ports and copycats in the era that we often rose-tint the lens we look at the time through. I really appreciate MVG for making these retrospectives and the time and care he puts in to honoring the developers of the past while driving the thought of how we should look at games as a medium. Back when we all needed to sail the high seas for games before we could afford to drop $20 on a skin for our multiplayer... The people working on that skin now were the ones hacking away at the engines to make the mods we've come to know and celebrate, the cheats we loathe and appreciate, and yes, the DRM we despise and contemplate... I guess my long-winded rant is: Maybe be kinder to the development team and ask the platforms why the cost is so high and the content so little. Support the little studios (like limited run, nightdive, etc) today... You never know who is the one to make something amazing, but they need to feel empowered and encouraged to do so.
This happens in software generally, the best, most optimized one happened back when computers were limited to 64MB RAM. Now, the Firefox Browser can't even run in old hardware at all, because they develop it with computers with a lot of resources available, and they end like bloated pieces of inefficient software because it works fine on the dev's computer.
@@Ovyron Absolutely correct. I was going to add in a bit about how wasteful of hardware resources a lot of modern coding is but I didn't want my reply to be a wall of text. Disciplined use of resources is now seen as an "old-fashioned" problem for programmers back in the days of highly limited and expensive resources.
Limitations in storage space kept the production costs in check. With lower costs came more risk taking. The biggest problem with modern games is too many of them are absurdly expensive to make.
This is the main point that nobody is talking about. Adding complexity and size to a game never made a game more fun to play
So scale back on the complexity until it becomes easier to make more complex games with the same cost, instead of dialing up the complexity and thus cost as much as possible.
Yes and no. What people forget is cartridge games from the SNES and Genesis days would cost upwards of $70, mostly from production cost. Same with N64. The CD revolution that basically began with the Sega CD is now you have 100X the space you did before and production of the disc itself was literally cents. The problem with modern games is team bloat. Take Call of Duty for example. The first game was made by 27 people. A new game in the series is made by 3,000 people and each of them needs to be paid. The problem here is that out of those 3,000 people, maybe 100 or 200 of them do anything useful. The rest is office bloat that could be fired today and the game would still reach deadline and probably be a better product without the other 2,800 people getting in the way.
5th generation: using creativity to surpass the limitations of technology and make the best games ever. 9th generation: using the unlimited power of technology to squash creativity and destroy the medium.
Bit sad innit
Oh man I can't believe you didn't mention ps1's CD quality audio. That was such a huge deal back then
Saturn and others already has that but yes it was
That was not the difference. Difference were how they approached playing music. Basically on PS1 you could play full songs from audio files. N64 was relying on previous experience were console had built in synthesiser with multiple tracks that could play sounds. Difference between earlier consoles like NES was that synthesiser could play samples instead of osc generating pulse waves and therefore you can store sample packs of any instrument and let console make song on the fly.
@@mdjey2 lol nerd
@@mdjey2 N64 could play low bitrate audio files. The sound quality was the biggest difference.
SegaCD had it a few years before, but yeah it was still pretty fresh tech for the time...
the pre rendered backgrounds of digimon world are like a dream
Also the music in that game with its limitations made it nostalgia for its time. Same with Pokemon RBY and even GSC
Donkey Kong country still holds up today
The graphics looked nice, with some cinematic tank controls. I loved the soft transitions, accompanied by the music as well. A lot of jrpgs on ps1 played slower than today's games, but felt so much more a relaxing experience. Tranquil at times with the character running into a sunset or misty woods. The art style of games like these were great.
Those 90's prerendered background sure look amazing. But they need proper uspcaling (like quality crt fitlers) to be beautiful. Just uspcaling them to nearest neighboor, or worst with ugly bilinear filter make them look bad. I remember being blown away by the Donkey Kong Country and Psone Final Fantasy games back then. But today's Final Fantasy Viii remaster is a joke, not only did they upscale the background with ugly filter making them super blurry, but they also upscalled the character models which empahis the differences even more. I guess than the main problem Squarenix has with these remaster is the Japanese language. Kanji are easier to read with high resolution, but without proper treatment of the rest of the graphics, it causes a lot of problems with the visuals to simply increase the resolution. Hopefully, with the advance of AI based upscaling, there will be solutions to upscale these 90's prerendered CG. background. The FF I moguri mod seems to be the right solution .
@@BrazileoTotalBrazil disagree , CRT is the intended medium to play these games on
Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, my favorite generation of gaming. There will never be another era quite like that one.
All I want to say is I really miss 4-player games of the n64 era. Playing Golden Eye with your buddies was insane back in the day.
You forgot the fact that there were NO UPDATES capability, since no storage, so games were much better finalized and tested than they are today
well, there were... but it would have to be a GLARING oversight by both manufacturing's QA. (Dev, and Platform) But we do see re-prints with upgraded versions.
...they really weren't. SO many games were broken out the gate back then too, and there was absolutely no way to fix them. You don't remember them, because they were bad.
*was NO (because "capability" is singular)
Today games aren't tested well because the graphics aren't ready until a few months before release, while the games are a lot bigger and usually not level based and this is caused by high graphical fidelity, which also balloons the budgets of AAA games to the Hundreds of Millions of dollars or in some rare cases even Billions. We should go back to 2004-2009 graphical fidelity, but with modern rendering technology(modern engines) and AAA budgets should be 5-25 million dollars.
But when there was a bug, it would be a huge problem. Like in Space Station Silicon Valley, they created a special final level that nobody ever got to see without cheats, because you needed to collect all the trophies to get it, but one particular trophy was glitched so you couldn't pick it up.
It was wild. So much diversity, so many experiments on 3D, gameplay and how to make it all work. Modern gaming tropes solidified during the ps2 era.
Experiments now vs then are fundamentally different Now, you experiment to differentiate from the norm Then, they were literally trying to figure out how it worked… there was no norm
@@jarde1989not true. Depends what game/genre we are talking. Some matured faster than others and certain genres were already subverting themselves by the 90s.
@@otterdonnelly9959 I’m really talking 3D games Yes, 2D games had matured by the mid 90s As for the “subversion” comment… thats exactly what time y’all about… Games and genres continuously experimented to identify the best way of doing things. Vs today where 90% of shooters, 3rd person games play the exact same because the genres have been refined over the last 2 decades.
modern gaming IGNORED those tropes and took the worst possible definition of "diversity" with it.
@@jarde1989 refined or dumbed down depending on who you are talking to. Regardless the restrictions forced people to optimize so games run efficiently. Now devs throw the whole kitchen sink but can’t even keep a steady fps.
One of the main things that has destroyed games is micro transactions, monthly, yearly subscription. I miss the old days.
Don’t forget season passes and internet required to play the game. Then you gotta download at least 3 updates.
You should play helldivers 2. Such a great refresher in the gaming community
It’s our fault for accepting it. We could’ve been like the Boston Tea Party people and said nope to all that.
Surprisingly I agree with you 100%. The PS1, N64 and Saturn era was the best generation of gaming we will ever have. As well the last great generation was the PS2, Xbox original and Gamecube. The variety in gameplay, universes, and story all hit an all time peak in the 5th generation. The limitations of those consoles made it great. I miss the days we would first hear about a game then it would be out 6 months later. PS1 Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 1-3, Fear Effect, Parasite Eve 1&2, Castlevania SOTN, Silent Hill, Einhander, R-Type Delta, Time Crisis, FF 7, Overblood N64 2 Zeldas, Indiana Jones, Star Wars SOTE, Winback, Sin & Punishment, Perfect Dark, 007 World Is Not Enough SAT 3 Panzer Dragoons, Deep Fear, Japan only quality ports like Real Bout Fatal Fury Special & Marvel vs Street Fighter PC Half Life, Star Wars Dark Force 2, Thief
I'm playing through Chrono Cross for the first time (Chrono Trigger being my favourite childhood game) and i cant express how refreshing, challenging and fun it is to play a game again where you don't have a big notification telling you where to go or what to do next. The UI is slow, the frame rate fluctuates, the graphics are old.. but.. the charm and atmosphere is beyond what some AAA games have today. Its like you know it was an uphill battle against the hardware limitations of the time but the developers didnt care and worked with the limitations to deliver their vision, gameplay and story.
i have all those SNES and ps1 RPGs ready to go but too little time :(
Same……. So sad.
And Chrono Cross has the greatest soundtrack of all time, so that's nice. :)
@@Brekfastmachine legendary 🔥
Just playing Chrono Trigger for the first time…loving it! Missed it at the time between Earthbound and Mario RPG then the N64…
Prime example back in the Day was Quake on Ps1, N64 and Saturn... Same name three different game engines and three different takes of the Original Game. I just love those days
Quake 1 didn't get a PS1 port and Saturn never got Quake 2 port.
Everything is x86 now, there's no need to have multiple engines, plus it would be very expensive if they did.
@@hpickettz34 true but the point of the video is to say how times have changed and how little effort they put these days to port a game properly to an underpower system. Probably that goes to the Nintendo switch
@@coolgreek79I wouldn’t say they don’t put effort into modern games because they’re significantly more complex than older games
@@crestofhonor2349 True... But do we really need all THAT complex games? The graphical leep wasn't all that great from Ps4 to 5 and the downsides are massive compared to the benefits and the price tag they ask for those so called upgrades
Truly a lost artform by these highly creative and optimized programmers. Really great video! :)
From time to time, you come across a video on KZhead that you just know is going to be comfort food in the future. A video you go back to, like rewatching Friends or The Office because there's just something about it. I can tell this is going to be that video for me. Incredible work, MVG. Thank you for this.
Necessity is the mother of all invention. Most modern games keep taking the approach of unlimited everything when in reality restrictions can end up creating some of the most beautiful art.
If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the father. Just think how many things have been invented to make people's jobs easier. Assemblers and compilers, libraries and APIs, all invented to save programmers work.
@@Roxor128 For that matter, how many things have each and every one of us done just as an investment in making a repetitive or otherwise pending task easier for our future selves? People really don't give laziness enough credit. A stitch in time? Meh, a stitch now or the same stitch later, no difference. A stitch in time saves nine, you say? Now I am all over that stitch! Few things motivate me like work now meaning the negation of even more work later. Though I prefer to consider it as valuing efficiency rather than seeking laziness.
The restrictions incentivized pushing envelopes and being innovative, something a lot of games lack now. Most modern titles just bloat their assets and focus on shinier gfx cuz it's the safe thing to do.
Nah, developers back then were just more talented and creative. Boomer and older Gen X game devs were simply more talented and driven than the Millennials that replaced them on triple A game publishers.
@@Johnnybomb1 true bro i'm video games now wear graphics dont really give a fuk but back then the games was 👌
You have to remember the other side here when it comes to limitations forcing creativity. Not only does working within hardware limits force creativity where it isn't needed now but it also forces middle management to accept creativity is needed. Everyone was looking for the new edge to sell a game. With modern consoles you can do just about anything from a creative standpoint now. Just look at indie games but AAA games always have the same push for "better" graphics and more microtransactions now.
Yes exactly. Sure there was games that sold due to great gameplay etc. but let’s not forget how many games that got publishing contracts and media exposure just due to “bragging” on a special fx or how much polygons then could push. So today with the more standard game engines as unreal etc at least it’s less down to tech and more to visuals and gameplay. Where sadly visuals / game scope / asset scope often is what sells a game as much as it being a fun game to play
@@litjellyfishgames are played for longer periods of time today than the 90s and 2000s. Infact, during that time mostly just nerds played games
@@litjellyfishSo Sega making a Sega CD and 32x and Game Gear with unplayable games was the highlight of the 90s.
@@ling8956 sorry but you are a bit misinformed about who played games back then. It was less people that played games yes. And due to it was a bit less mainstream. I can assure you it was not just a nerd thing but most all played games. (Like depending on how you define “nerd” it’s probably more % of nerds playing today compared to back then it’s just that the gaming market is so vastly bigger today than then. About the playing time you are correct. At least regarding the amount of times people play per day (actually in many games the games themselves was played for longer periods)
@@ling8956 haha not really. I think you forgot Dreamcast, N64 and PlayStation 2 ;) games like Zelda ocarina of time. Shen Mue and MGS series
I'm so grateful that I grew up in the 90s and 2000s where there was actual innovation and the game came complete on a disc or cartridge and didn't require a legal agreement and an internet connection to play.
Thanks again for this great video! I was taken aback to the great days of video games that I too am glad to have been a part of.
facts. the limitation forced devs to be creative, innovative, etc. Sure there were always lazy devs too back then, but there were also the ambitious ones who did magic with the limitations of the 8-16-32-64 bit generations.
Batman return of the joker on NES was a pure magic.
no way man, ever played Superman on the n64. those are devs ats its finest
Blame Warner Bros for anything that went wrong with soup 64. The devs a titus had to comb through a huge archive of comics to prove that Jonathan Spooperman could, in fact, *go underwater*
Yes, Warner Bros has always had this leadership problem.
The problem is that I don't think the game engine's being used nowadays are flexible and the developers using them have learnt how to use them only within their limitations. I doubt there are any game devs under the age of say 30 who would know how to even code their own rendering engine, yet alone modify someone else's... all hardware is managed for them...
This is the same reason behind Mario Maker only giving you a few selection of tools/objects to create a level upon first starting the game. It forces you to be creative with what you have
And also with Mario paint as well 😂
No matter what it's just a run and jump platformer, nothing creative about that.
The Nintendo64/Playstation era is an inflection point in videogames history, the jump to 3D environments meant a lot of trial and error for developers, and Mario 64 being the first one to achieve a good playable 3D experience. You hit the nail showing how developers overcame the technical limitations of the hardware. Thank you for the awesome video!
Limitations = creativity
I love that Era growing up. Everything was so different but at the same time similar. Kinda wish that consoles nowadays were the same way.
That is why I like the Nintendo Switch. It still has unique quirks and takes talented developers to make impressive games on it. People keep talking about wanting the Switch 2 to be able to run games in 4k at 60 fps, but I just have no desire for that at all.
@@petemiller2598 if you take the plunge and get a decent pc for yourself, i guarantee you'll be singing a different tune. higher frame rates and crisper resolutions will spoil you like that. and i agree with you, the switch is a neat little piece of hardware. still underutilized, not even first party games that make full use of everything that console is capable of. joycons have gyro, accelerometers, nfc support for amiibos, an infrared sensor capable of being used as a camera or to measure things like heart rate, all the crap that labo enabled you to do, flexible configurations, hd rumble, it's quite feature rich. and yet not much is done with like half of that shit
One thing that made the PS1 so amazing that is very underreported is PSY-Q (the development kit developed by Psygnosis). There's a fascinating interview with the developer of GwenWar on the Sega Saturn where he basically says that the reason so many developers flocked to the PS1 was because the SDK was so easy to use - as oppose to Nintendo's and Segas which had no documentation (or most of it was in Japanese). This was normal at the time, but Sony offering an entire manual with their SDK changed the industry and it's reason the PS1 dominated and why buying Psygnosis was so important to Sony
The PSX was also by far the easiest of the three consoles to program for. It had one GPU, one CPU, and one audio chip, those were your main processors. The Saturn had SIX chips dedicated to those tasks, one of which had to be written solely in assembly code for, and the N64 was bottlenecked by dogshit memory bandwidth and low game storage capacity. Many N64 games were written in C, but there were some PSX games later in its life that used plenty of MIPS assembly because they had that much room to push the hardware.
You remain at the top of the class, sir. Excellent content. I enjoyed how you explained the technical reasons behind both systems' signature looks. Others have done it before but you did it better.
I have noticed a lot of modern games fail to implement simple optimizations that you wouldn't dare do without back in the day. It is just pure laziness most of the time. But I think a lot of optimizing techniques have been forgotten as well. They replaced it with computer automation to generate textures and effects on a tighter deadline. To me its absolutely maddening. Also the best 2d PS1 backgrounds are in Legend of Dragoon because it is my favorite PS1 game hehe.
YES! My favourite was Crash Bandicoot, they did SO much to make that work, hacking the PS1 even streaming in parts of the level just in time, and how they compressed the animations. I watched a series called War Stories (search How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation), where devs from that era talked about developing and getting around these limitations. Utterly fascinating, and yes, a lost art form in the era of throwing more memory and CPU power at everything.
Now how exactly did this help the gameplay?
'War Stories' is a must-watch - it's a series that the Ars Technica YT used to do
A lot of people don't realize, but the ARS Technica War Stories interviews have extended cuts without editing that you can watch. It means there aren't any fancy graphics to look at, but you get way more information.
@@MrGamelover23 Some of them do - the Lorne Lanning extended cut is awesome, that's an amazing dude!
Those 5 PS1 crash games also aged pretty well, the art and graphical style really cleans up well
I was like 4 or 6 when I had to stay in hospital for few days and in a child room they had a small TV and a PS1, some kid was playing Spyro 1 the dark level in the first world and this was the first time I saw something like this. Later I would get a Ps1 and Spyro1. I still have that ps1, the ultra scratched game disc that somehow still works and even the memory card with my very first save. In fact all my early childhood saves are still on that small grey now turning yellowish memorycard. Good innocent times.
It was an art form in itself to get everything out of the hardware you needed for your games, which required to study the programming manuals intensely to find gems hidden in short sentences which gave your game a one-up to the competition. I touched the N64 and PS1 just slightly but went into programming GameCube and PS3, so I'm looking forward to watching the next videos.
Love this episode! It's like revealing the kayfabe of the video game world. Thanks for sharing!
I think something a lot of lowpoly artists and even indie devs fundamentally don't understand about the fifth gen graphics is that texture warping, low resolution and low polygon count aren't an "aesthetic", they were constraints developers had to work under. You can't just put together an ugly lowpoly model, throw in a CRT filter and call it a day because "that's how ps1 games looked," no, it was about how much good graphics you could cram in within those constraints. The only fangame I can remember that understood this is Sonic Triple Trouble 16-Bit
Yeah thats my problem with most indie retro style games, especially 3d ones. They try on purpose to make the games look ugly instead of making the games look like a cutting edge of that gen. The fifth gen at its absolute peak was capable of more impressive graphics than what the indie scene show at times.
@@sebastianaliandkulche there's also a problem I have with some sprite-based indie titles, this have been said in various sites but sprite weren't meant to look that blocky or jagged, CRTs monitors hide many of the imperfections. And another thing I dislike about some modern sprites-based games are those who feature very limited animations, I know that drawing sprites is difficult, but games made in the late 90s for arcade boards like Street Fighter III and Mark of the Wolves show a clear evolution in artistry when you compare it with their predecessors like Street Fighter II and the original Fatal Fury
I think devs understand perfectly well that it was due to hardware constraints but they like the look anyway and want to emulate it. It's as much of an aesthetic choice as a VHS filter. Deciding on how "cutting edge" a game that's a retro throwback is supposed to look is kind of nebulous.
@@pablocasas5906 yeah, as someone who studies how Sprites work, nothing triggers my flight or fight response more than when someone looks at anything made with pixels and goes "oh hey it's 8-bit!" Also yeah, a huge factor with Sprites is making sure you can read them on a crappy CRT, and lots of modern sprite artists make stuff that looks decent enough on modern displays but would look like sludge on a CRT.
The cringiest thing is when they attempt to make an "8/16bit graphics" game and it just looks like "8/16bit graphics" game on a high res lcd (awful/incorrect look).
'Fear Effect' did a fantastic job.
I never got far in that game, but I still think of its art direction.
And the Remake apparently got cancelled.
I was very disappointed with the follow up sequel. The first game was one of the best ever made.
Man this is such a great video. Way to go man. When I was in college for game design we talked about some of these techniques and basically the art of doing the most you can with as little as you can. Now it seems that no developer, even first party developers on PlayStation or Xbox are building their games for the target hardware. Everything is just built how they build it and they hope your PC can run it while the console versions suffer. I miss when games were developed for specific hardware it was really unique.
Good video. I liked the N64s capability of using data from Gameboy games through the "Transfer Pak" to do extra stuff in N64 games, particularly being able to use your Pokemon in Pokemon Stadium. I hope you cover the peripherals that were available on the GameCube, PS2, Dreamcast, & X-Box, in your discussion about them.
Glad to see Fear Effect got a shout on here! Definitely one of my favorite uses of what they did with backgrounds on the PS1. That alone took up much of the storage on it since it was a 4 disc game yet at the same time is quite short.
Even if Hardware limitations were reintroduced it wouldn't make a difference because in this day in age it's about maximizing profits and cutting costs.
Or just remaking old games (poorly)
which is where people mention Indies.... and that's great and all. But the industry in whole suffers for it
its always been that way, they didn't invent capitalist profit motives after u turned 15
@@WannabeMarysuelol yea. These kids keep crying on Twitter about capitalism and the patriachy.
Games as a service is the issue.
MVG please, never stop! I truly appreciate your take on all things gaming like this video. It's always better listening to someone who was experiencing the games first hand and not just from reading articles. Thanks for the upload MVG. 🔥💯👍
Man you hit the nail right on the head for what I've always loved the N64 on the PS1 even to this day. That generation was so exploratory and inventive in all the different kinds of games we got, and it invented and reinvented so many genres and people weren't afraid to experiment what does new 3D Tech
Mortal Kombat 4's N64 port uses the original arcade version's cutscenes. They replaced them with FMVs for the CD versions.
Personally, I much prefer cutscenes to be made using the game's engine, rather than having pre-recorded FMVs, even if the FMVs are almost always of better quality than the in-game engine's graphics. To me, the shift from the game engine's graphics to an FMV cutscene, and therefore the sudden change in graphics quality (even if it's a temporary improvement, until the cutscene ends and the game's engine then takes over) just takes me out of the game and reminds me it's not real. Incidentally, the mostly excellent Unreal Championship 2, for the original XBox, was the first game I remember seeing where the pre-rendered FMVs were actually a lower quality than the in-game graphics (the latter were excellent). That always seemed strange.
@@ConkerTS I 100% agree
More like "mom I want to play MK4 on this arcade" Mom: "but we have MK4 at home!" MK4 at home: .....So glad I opted for a PS1 as a kid.
PS1 and N64 are my two favorite consoles of all time. I don't care too much about modern games anymore thanks to the modern toxic business models. Currently playing through all the games I missed back then and I am having an absolute blast.
Same, I've been spending all my time with 5th and 6th gen games and it's been a way better experience than games today
Currently playing G-Police :P
Doing the same and have been looking through the 7th gen era, even with the patches and dlc games have, the game quality really is night and day
To me the most interesting architecture in this regard was PS2. It could be simultaneously the weakest and the strongest of that gen, depending on how developers approached it and their knowledge and experience of it.
@@kosmosyche Especially it's high bandwidth, which was really it's secret weapon
That was an awesome episode, looking forward to the next video! Great insight keep up the good work 😁
Another good use for the FMV capabilities of Ps1, was to make game cutscenes for a story mode, something that today is a standard for almost any game, but back then was a novelty. A good example of this are the Driver games (specially the 2nd one), also a good example of a huge and revolutionary 3D world, imposible to make it happen in N64
Thanks for sharing this masterpiece. I love to read or see limitations on the NES era, too. They kind of used SWAP (the mappers) to overcome the lack of memory (RAM and ROM). Seeing from today's eyes might look simple, but I imagine how much of a thoughtful process it was. The budget for timing/cpu was something else. :) And on top of all this, it was a simpler era where we (SWE/Hardware folks) could follow and understand the whole flow end-to-end.
What amazes me even more is when I have learned about the programming for the Atari 2600. It was before my time, but the concept of "racing the beam" where programmers were having to worry about the exact timing of the electron gun on the CRT is absolutely nuts. Those games may look simple to modern eyes, but the engineering behind them was masterful.
I was fortunate enough to have both systems, and I absolutely loved them both. It was such a generational jump in ability that we overlooked so many of the flaws. We just celebrated successes on both systems. It truly was an amazing time!
Fantastic work, great explanations and demonstrations of your points. Looking forward to more.
Damn i love your videos of these retro content lately. Especially documentary style on things like old graphics, development, hardware
Still fondly remember renting N64 consoles and games from Blockbuster during the late 90's. That era and the PS2/DC/GC/Xbox were my favourite...and Great for the PC too. Every year felt like a massive upgrade.
I've felt for years now that developers have lost their creativity and edge because they no longer need to work around the strict hardware limitations that they used to. The massively creative solutions they used to need to overcome those problems, would breed creativity and excellence in the games themselves. These days instead they can just throw power at the problems, and it has caused games to lose their uniqueness. Hell, you can notice this with just the music across console generations. I can't even remember any specific music tracks from basically any games made in the last 20 years, but I can immediately recall music from mega drive, SNES, and PS1 era games.
What a great episode and I agree! I love it with creativity trumps technical limitations and one of the reasons why I love being a retro gamer. From Sega Master System and NES to Sega Genesis and SNES to N64 and Sega Saturn and PS1, when developers overcame the limitations of the hardware the games just felt more special. I did not put my figure on it before but this is one of the reasons why I like playing those "impossible ports" on the Nintendo Switch. Not only is it an incredible achievement to have games like Doom on the Switch but often times those games have longer battery run times on the Switch when compared to the same games on a system like the Steam Deck.
Dude I have no idea why you think you're on a downswing, your content has been *killin'* it lately. Thanks for the continued great content! 😊
The PS1 is my favorite videogame console of all time, simply because I found the CD based game systems so fascinating. I believe to get around some of the seeking limitations of the CD on PS1, Naughty Dog pioneered virtual memory with Crash Bandicoot. I also just love the CD format itself. It's so crazy to me that data can be stored as pits and lands on a metal disk. Wild.
Voice acknowledgements was implemented in Dune 2 and Warcraft to hide the unit activation delay caused by path calculation. It's such a characteristic part of game design today, but only happened because of system limitations.
A brilliant video. My first one of your channel. Instant subscriber! I can’t wait to see what you say about the PS2/DC/XBox/GC era!
13:38 completely agree! Great vid, thank u for making it and for showing how limitations and obstacles bring together amazing developer talents which r admired and celebrated till today.
I feel like it's for this very reason that Nintendo still has an understanding of how to work with lower specs, probably why imo the switch first party library feels the most robust and interesting out of the current gaming era
It actually makes me think that despite whatever their next system will be, even if it's less powerful than PS5 and Xbox Series X, developers and publishers might see the limited hardware as more appealing due to them not needing to spend nearly as much time or money on development. That's probably not going to happen, but it's something I've been thinking about for a while.
@@Dad_Shoes That's a key reason why Nintendo keeps their hardware lower spec is to reduce costs overall it's honestly smart, it works great for Indies and AA which usually aren't that demanding, it also has the added effect of showing which developers really took the time to optimize and which ones didn't
@@Dad_Shoesthe games industry has shifted in such a manner that I don’t believe the gap between Nintendo’s next console and the PS5/XSX will be as large as Switch to PS4: there’s already been leaks showcasing a next-gen NVIDIA SoC with comparable performance to the Series S. also, most of the games that are actually attempting to utilize the PS5 and XSX’s power are so poorly optimized that they struggle to run at stable framerates, even with extremely low internal resolutions compared to the displays they’re targeting. game engine scalability has simply become too important to engine design for publishers to ignore potential opportunities. so, no, I don’t think the next Nintendo console will have such a massive power gap between hardware like it is now.
Sadly the Wii had a whole slew of low grade shovelware that came out of the Wii being cheaper to make games for.
Couldn't agree more, MVD, very glad to see you make a video on this. I make music for Banjo-Kazooie and Zelda romhacks, and the constraints really shape the end product in ways people don't expect. Being limited to midis, pushed down to 16 channels, low quality samples, limits on how many notes can play at once, pitch shift limits, straight-up bugs and errors and much more mean your songs need serious work nearly every time to just play ingame at all. My favourite example is the sound quality between Josh Mancell's pre-mix Crash Bandicoot music, then hearing the final version - the hardware limits are hard and fast, but your creativity in working around that is the only limit on things still sounding good. And damn does the Crash soundtrack still slap. Cheers for covering this stuff! 🍻
Excellent videos! Looking forward to your future architecture analysis. It would be especially cool if you could dive even deeper into the technologies used on the various consoles.
When I worked in QA, I worked on a lot of games that felt like they were way too bloated for the scope they were shooting for. The lack of space optimization was real - like, a wrestling game shouldn't be like 60GB installed. While I think the modern scene offers more value per dollar than the old days (I say this having been around since the NES era), the loss of more tightly developed experiences is a real one. I'll take strong art design and experiences that don't outlast their welcome any day of the week. And the old days definitely had quite a few games that fit that bill.
Game publishers and studios are still creative and innovative, but instead channeling them on overcoming hardware limitation they channeling their creativity and innovation on nickel-and-diming the consumer LOL
I think you'll find creativity has actually taken a heavy hit.
It's the Indie and AA's that are picking up the slack these days, AAA these days just can't really do that unfortunately, but the flip side is that graphics nowadays are good enough to where low budget games look perfectly fine
@@mrlewz0r Yes. Modern AAA games are pretty boring and predictable these days. They've got it down to a science. There's way too much of an emphasis on scale and making it as cinematic as possible, while sacrificing gameplay depth. There are exceptions of course, but overall that's been the trend of the past decade or so.
My absolute favorite pre-rendered backgrounds are on Final Fantasy X on the PS2. Truly a leap in art direction from the Psx era of background art
Final Fantasy X uses almost no pre-rendered backgrounds, only some interiors but most are in 3D
@@jsr734 Correct
@@jsr734 Baten Kaitos for GCN has great-looking pre-rendered backgrounds in that generation of games.
@@MachFiveFalcon Yes, i have heard of it. Also Onimusha 2 has some beautiful pre rendered animated backgrounds.
Have my PS1 and N64 connected to my 480i CRT and captured with my PC and displaying preview on PC OLED. Really happy you mentioned Resident Evil 2. That was cool to see recently after I regained my consoles of youth and modded them all like the good old days. RE2 uses the 8MB expansion RAM if detected and the backgrounds look really damn good me looking over at the CRT now as I type. I played that game when a friend brought it over for millennium party my parents had, but never played this version until now. I'll throw it on the backburner but I am currently playing through RE4 on WiiCube and PS2 and switching back and forth between chapters with my analog switcher box. Love your channel and after many years of solely emulating games I went on a rampage and have been having a blast this year delving into real hardware but with mods and also porting my emulation saves back and forth. Great work!
The very ending was satisfying. I vaguely remember shooting him on goldeneye back in the day and it was satisfying
I just gotta say, I really appreciate you and your channel, I rarely if ever comment but I always look forward to watching your video's, being a kid in the 80's and 90's, I really dig this. Thank you!
Interesting video. It's also fascinating to see how quickly video games evolved in the 1990s. It's very hard to believe that there's only 5 years between the release dates of Mario World and Mario 64. There's more time (7 years) between the two Last of Us games, yet there isn't a huge difference between the two. Mario 64 brought a 2D series seamlessly into 3D. The Last of Us Part II is pretty similar to the first one, but with better visuals and a few incremental design improvements.
Id agree with you until you said tlou pt 2 is the same as pt 1 but with better visuals and design improvements. when in practice, this is just blatant false information and a terrible analogy because of it. The gameplay alone of pt 2 is so different and unique from pt1 that it can be its own separate game. And the visuals being understated to just better is just doing a disservice to the game. I hate TLO2 yet I still am amazed at how true to life the game looks and how damn amazing the combat is. The combat in part 1 is stupud simple and was basically a handholding movie.
@@miguelhxrnandez Ok, so what would you say makes Part II's gameplay unique in terms of mechanics? Genuinely curious. Sorry if my comment came across as dismissive of the TLOU. I like both TLOU and Part II. Naughty Dog are one of the best devs around when it comes to polish and attention to detail in their games (the animations in part II in particular are phenomenal). I enjoyed Part II a lot, but in terms of gameplay I only saw ND adding a few things to the established formula while embellishing other things that were already there (e.g. crafting).
SNES Era should have last longer 😢
At first glance looking at a youtube video it may seem like the case, but after playing the game for some hours you would realize that TLOU2 is literally the definition of a next gen title, the evolution of PS4 capabilities versus PS3. You would never fit the amount of geometry on screen at once, the open areas, the real time cutscenes (which in PS3 i remind you they were prerender and look less detailed), insane amount of subtle details, complex AI, complex lightning, shaders, physics, 1080p resolution, etc on a PS3, is just impossible. TLOU1 is how we seen TLOU2 back in the day, lol.
@@miguelhxrnandezThe point is the the technological and functional jump is nowhere NEAR as big in TLOU games than the transition from the 16-bit era to low poly - even in less time. It takes more time, energy, and resources to make a smaller evolution today.
Super video, very interesting. With the cost of everything going up I wonder if the publishers want the architectures to be the same so that its easier for them to port games to other systems. Though it feels like its almost that we will eventually only have a single platform if we keep going this way (or even everything just goes to PC eventually).
Fear Effect was and remains a favourite because of the pre-rendered backgrounds 👍
Great video MVG, this is certainly true for films as well, limitations marked artistic visions and to some extend required more creativity to present an idea.
I feel like the PS3/XB360 was the last era where console hardware was different yet interesting. The Xbox 360 being the 1st system to use a Tri-Core Processor with a GPU that uses Unified Shaders. The Playstation 3 with the Infamous Cell Processor that was notorious for being difficult but powerful when used by the right hands.
I agree with that. Sadly, technological advancement inevitably yields homogeneity. Look at Android vs iPhone and Windows vs Mac these days. Besides fanboys, nobody would seriously argue that these platforms are appreciably different as far as capabilities anymore. It's more of a preference over what ecosystem you want to be in. Same with Xbox vs PlayStation in 2024. The Switch is still a little different, which is why I love it.
Well, my Samsung sucks compared to my Motorola phone. If the first letter is wrong but the rest of he word is correct, my Samsung has no idea what to do it's pathetic. If I accidently spell Oathetic instead of pathetic, the auto correct still has no idea what I am trying to type.
My favourite game of all time is Metal Gear Solid 1. A masterpiece. Great voice acting, music, characters, boss fights, emotion, location. Perfect! A MASTERPIECE
Your videos are truly a love letter to a bygone era. Cheers mate!
What awesome content. This video speaks from my soul. Sometimes I feel like modern games are developed using a cookie-cutter approach - when I return to my retro library I'm often reminded how unique these retro games are, be it because of technical limitation or other reasons. Keep up the good work!
modern gaming shifted because the improvements in technology allowed publishers to improve at their nickel-and-dime schemes. the rise of mobile gaming brought about the beginning of the end of big AAA console games being a trustworthy source of quality content. by 2024, the vast, vast majority of the AAA games industry has been utterly consumed by this capitalistic virus. so many of the best games that have come out so far this year have belonged to indie devs, and the ratio of indie PC exclusives to console games grows with each passing month. i’d say that the second half of the PS3/360 era was when things began to go downhill, and by the PS4 it was in full swing.
this is so true. I was a SNES programmer back in the day. The things we had to do to make the game work meant that we fussed over all of the details. Games these days just choose a genre and hope for the best.
Woah, that's really cool! What SNES games you programmed for?
@@MaxwelThuThu game genie, rock n roll racing, and a few others. Overall I worked on or was lead on about 20 snes games.
@@allenbythesea The game genie? Damn that's a big one, was that one different from the other games you programed?
I view each of the video game consoles from the 80s and 90s as different art mediums that have their own unique qualities and limitations that give games a special feel. And it's always fascinating to study how people used these mediums in different ways to create their games. By the mid 2000s with the HD era, all of the consoles became digital color photography. Which is nice but I also like art created with the limitations of oil paint on canvas or pencil on paper.
This gen is my favorite type of videos you do. I'd be interested to have a video about the Sega Saturn if you get the time!
Limitations that existed in terms of processing power, storage, ways to patch game breaking bugs, etc, pushed devs to be more creative and careful with their work. Nowadays they don't optimize properly, and everything feels like a copy of another game. No wonder we're reaching a breaking point like the bubble that caused the videogame market crash in 1983. Some things are eerily similar.
Yet the industry has become too big to fail now
@@Matanumi I didn't say it will fail. It didn't fail in 1983 either. But many companies shut down and many people in the industry lost their jobs. It took a few years and some innovation to bring the industry back and push it further. Like a great reset.
@@Matanumi EA Dice will fail*
@@xavijggwhat I think will happen isn’t a total industry collapse but a collapse of the AAA sector, especially in the West. the game I believe will cause the tipping point is GTA VI.
@@crimson-foxtwitch2581 I think that'll just be another case of Japan just being above everyone else. The US may get out of there fine & so would likely most of Europe, but countries whose economies are REALLY in trouble... yeah those industries may have some serious danger up ahead.
Yeah I was team Saturn and owned all these consoles and enjoyed them accordingly. Totally agree when you say we saw some of the best gaming during that era. It was very exciting and then the Xbox modding scene turned up! Happy days, thank you for your videos. I really enjoy and appreciate your insight into what was a large part of my life.
I think Saturn and before that the PC Engine really amazed more than anything in overcoming limitations. There is little on the SNES and Genesis for 3D I think that matches Sappire.
I never had a Saturn at the time in the 90s, but I just bought one with a Fenrir Duo card, and OMG I am having a blast. There has never been a better time to have a Sega Saturn, as there has been an explosion of fan translation for japanese exclusives, of which there are many!
Thank you for this video! Extremely well summarised. 🙂
Can't agree more. I love examples where devs used quirks of the hardware and clever programming to go beyond system limitations. That's probably why I appreciate Atari 2600 games (everything beyond combat needs thought) and C64 games with 9+ sprites and parallax backgrounds. Great video - thanks for sharing.
Consoles started their decline around the PS3 era. The whole industry, really.
The reason is basically F2P and P2W games that smartphone game era leaked to console/PC gaming. In reality game devs really has no hardware limitation now a days in making fun games.
Ps3/Xbox 360/Wii era was arguably the last good console generation. After that you could honestly get a better experience on PC
@@kevinfoughtconsoles were especially bad that era, first truly awful generation of gaming
@@sunnohh lol what? It had some of the best games that generation with console exclusives
@@kevinfought I think he's talking about how the consoles where way more prone to fail in this gen. look all the consoles with YLoD and RRoD
PS1 will always have a special place for me, because it is where I loved video games. Sure, I started with Mario/Contra, but the PS1 is where I "understood" video games. Tekken 3 Demolition Racer Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare Street Sk8er 2 Ehrgeiz (Forsaken Dungeon) NASCAR 2000 Metal Slug/X Ah, good times.
instant likes to this channel, unique an fantastic content! it's like going to the past and feel others share the same feeling for retro stuff.
Techniques used in crash bandicoot for ps1 were absolute genius
Possibly the most optimized game ever. If the same techniques and optimization were used just 8 years later or so we could had already reached photorealism.
Zoomies will never ever experience that glorious jump from 8-bit to 16-bit 2D and then 32-bit 3D within 3 generations.
And practically within one decade too (!) Think about it: at the beginning of the '90s, the dominant platform was still the NES, with the Sega Genesis having only just been released in August of '89 (and 18 months before the first Sonic game which would make the system mainstream); while at the end of the '90s we have the release of the Sega Dreamcast and are a few months away from the launch of the PS2! That is absolutely insane technological progress. Gaming moved so incredibly rapidly in the '90s that it almost felt like something revolutionary was happening every other month. There was so many incredible games coming out on so many different platforms that it was easy to see why so many games (which would be standouts today) simply fell through the gaps (and later become cult classics/hidden gems).
I actually did! Born in 97, I grew up poor and thus with hand-me-down systems. Went from NES to Genesis, PlayStation. I feel really really lucky in a way when I look back.
True, but retro gaming is still a popular thing with younger people. It shows the staying power games of that era have.
Nowadays, wo do not jump from Super Mario world to Mario Sunshine in a decade. We play GTA 5 on PS3, PS4 and PS5. Sometimes Skyrim, too.
Playing Mario 64 for when it was new was breathtaking. It is still a timeless game because they somehow nailed the controls on their first 3D game. Miyamoto really is a genius.
The 5th generation was the best generation for more reasons that I can list here.
Really looking forward to on a deep dive in the architecture of the Dreamcast!. Thanks for a great video as always!
On Duckstation using a linear screen filter in SW mode, and scanlines in mode2 (vertical and horizontal scanlines that make little squares) anything with pre-rendered background and FMV's look flipping stunning on my 12" ThinkPad X201. Completed FF7 again yesterday for I think the 9th time, and just started FF9 last night. FF9 looks flipping beautiful 😍 I treasure my old ThinkPad just for playing PS1 games. Thanks for this video, I could talk about the PS1 for hours lol. Such an astonishing little machine. I was lucky to be a teenage boy during it's peak.
majority of modern devs are playing around in map editors for the same 5 game engines.
Yes development has been made easier for people. That's a good thing.
@@RubyRose23328 Clearly, based on the quality of things coming out in general, it really isn't.
@@mrlewz0r The engine isn't what makes the game good lol.
@@RubyRose23328 It allows less talented people in to the market, which dilutes the quality.
yes, because it's unfeasible to develop an engine from scratch. except for small scale games. PC is a very complex beast nowadays. you have to target an architecture with myriad hardware and driver options, dozens of resolutions and aspect ratios and somehow make it work. oftentimes it's just easier to use an engine someone else developed.
Wow never understood why N64 textures looked “soft”. Now I need to go relive some of those old games
Completely agree with this video. Amazing stuff. I also miss the innovation at the Mega Drive/Genesis vs SNES era vs Pentium PCs showing up. Those were some crazy times for gaming as well.
what an amazing channel you have. i always learn so much (and it's interesting!)