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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   2909 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Yes, games were better back then. Post mobile game design is all based on farming engagement. There is zero reason Doom Eternal needs weekly quests, or a bajillion cosmetic unlockables, or a weird meta progression mechanics. It's just more shit trying to hijack the compulsive part of your brain. Because game devs now are either evil, or stupid. They know the difference between compulsive and fun, and try to get you addicted out of selfish desire, or they don't and they just follow along because it's what is done.

Also, games were more responsive back then. On a console hooked up to a CRT TV, or a computer with interrupt based input (PS/2) and a CRT monitor, input to action was virtually instantaneous in a properly programmed game. These days there is a distinct fuzziness to game input, and many games actually allow you to input commands late and have them still count to compensate for this. I recall watching a video about some rogue like that let you jump a few frames after you had already walked off a ledge because of input lag.

This isn't true. Attention sink traps with microtransactions are not the entire market.

Many game genres that were invented then were only perfected now.

E.g. 'Transport Fever' 1/2 is what Transport Tycoon devs would have made had they had modern tech and 10x the budget. It has (judging by the screens) all the fun, all the systems but even sligthly more complexity and of course, modern graphics.

Same for strategy games, RPGs.

I was shocked by how clunky Far Cry 3 felt since I grew up playing arena shooters a little bit. PS2 saw some of the best games a console has seen. Console shooters, sandbox titles larping as RPGs became worse with each generation.

Quake Live feels like a different world compared to Valorant.

That's called coyote time, and it's a pretty commonplace feature of most platformers these days, not just in one or two games. Judging from the trend, It seems to be the case that consumers prefer the feeling of that timing much better than strict one-pixel-past -the-ledge and you're dead timing.

Its fuzzy in that there is a gap between what is shown to you and what the inputs will do, but it does not have to be fuzzy in the sense that the game will likely still have a strict threshold it adheres for what is 'too late'.

I suspect the reason that almost all games do this now is that it is much more fun to play them. Donkey Kng Country on SNES, for example, had being able to jump out of a mid-air roll as an almost explicit mechanic. It's similar to how the physics of changing Mario's momentum midair never made any sense - but guees what, Mario is much more fun to control than games with no influence over midair movement.

I was a aware of the technical fix (even Doom Eternal does it, and speedrunners combined it with the weapon wheel to turn that physics nudge into an abusable catapult), but I had never seen it called "coyote time" before. That name is perfect.

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