Classic - PS3 / 360 /
Retro - PS1 / N64, Ps2
V I N T A G E - SNES / NES / Genesis
It’s my system to make me feel less old do not judge me
Video games 20 years ago:
lol. It’s Frieren!
Even more lol, in this thread no mention of the elf represented in the pic.
Am I the only millennial that actually feels things that happened more than a decade ago are old?
Like I get it, the ps3 wasn’t before my time, but it’s ancient now given how we just got the ps5 pro.
Yes. You are.
It got even worse when COVID hit. I could have sworn that 2019 was just last year, yet here we are, and the 2020s are almost halfway over. It literally feels like I’m missing an entire decade of my life.
Technology seems to be behind 10 years as well. I mean we’ve had 4K monitors for over a decade now, yet you still need to spend nearly $2000 for a GPU powerful enough to run games at that resolution and a modern refresh rate. Meanwhile back in the 2000s, we went from 480i gaming, to 720p/1080i, to 1080p, all within 5 years. Smartphones from 10 years ago were black slabs running Android or iOS, and today they’re black slabs running Android or iOS. Windows 10 has been around for almost a decade now too. Back in the 90s, we went from Windows 3.1, to Win95, to 98, to Me. Advancements in technology and software come in small, incremental improvements, when not too long ago a new life-changing thing was coming out every 2-3 years. The only tech I’ve noticed keeping up with the times is internet bandwidth. In 20 years I went from dialup to 256kbps to 3Mbps to 15 to 30 to 80 to 500; now I have Gigabit internet and my monthly bill has never been smaller.
I think what you’re noticing is corporate greed. There have been substantial life changing discoveries in the last decade. The problem is that corporate investors can’t find ways to exploit it so they shelve the patents. Another thing that happens is someone holds a patent but can’t or won’t allow someone to use it because the price isn’t right so it sits without any use.
When someone says retro game console I think of NES. Maybe SNES. Now that you mention it I can see N64. But no way Gamecube seems retro let alone Wii. They were on discs! Lol
Been coming to terms that I became old lately lol. Weird how it sneaks up on you. You are young, get busy a couple years pass and ok you are a young adult. Then time seems to speed up and before you know it you are exhausted and old living in what was recently the way off future.
Then I think there are people more than twice my age, even some 3 times. How in the world are people still functioning at all at that age? How are people president of the United States in their 80’s? I just rolled over 3 days ago and hurt my shoulder.
I have a theory that what we refer to as retro doesn’t advance by a year every year. In the same way words like “antique” and “vintage” bring about specific time periods and aesthetics, “retro” does as well. I’m just pulling a number out of my ass here, but say it’s like every three years that go by one year is added to what we call retro. That would mean it would take 15 years from the time we begin viewing SNES as retro to view PS1 as retro because they were released five years apart. So, if we say PS1 is retro now, that would mean we began to view SNES as retro in 2009. This sounds right, maybe? It’s hard to put myself back in that time period, but I definitely would’ve called NES games retro in 2009, but SNES it’s harder to say.
This methodology is flawed because of “retro” is tied to an aesthetic or time period then at some point nothing new will ever be considered “retro” and we’d eventually begin using a different term to refer to things from later.
A good example is “oldies” on the Radio. Nothing newer is really entering the group of songs we consider oldies.
In the same way words like “antique” and “vintage” bring about specific time periods and aesthetics, “retro” does as well.
In my opinion, “retro” gaming is a misnomer and “vintage” is more fitting for what people usually mean. Retro is something modern or recent made in an older style. Actual old stuff is “vintage”. So a game like UFO 50 is actual retro gaming; of course the definition gets more fuzzy when you look at ROM hacks that don’t even work on the original hardware of the base ROM. But if you buy an original old console and play the games from back then, that’s not really retro by the original definition.
However, I’m well aware that this ship has sailed
To me, it’s less about the time since the console and more about what the average game on the console looked like. While I personally range from “don’t mind” to “quite enjoy” older graphics including pixel art and low poly 3D, the average N64 honestly looked pretty awful in comparison to modern 3D graphics. In Super Mario 64, Bob Omb Battlefield was 2,352 polygons total, compared to an average of 60,000 per level in Super Mario Sunshine. Not to mention all of the additional effects that the GC was able to pull off on top of just raw polygon counts.
The PS1 to PS2 transition had a similar leap in graphical fidelity, though the last major PS1 titles certainly looked a lot closer to what the early PS2 titles did at the time. While I think Final Fantasy 9 looks amazing and it sometimes surprises me that it’s a PS1 title, I think Final Fantasy 7 looked closer (than at least 9 does) to what the average PS1 title looked like graphic wise and the difference in quality between it and Final Fantasy 10 is an incredible leap.
I guess you could also make the argument that retro games are the ones that were primarily designed for being played on a CRT in which the sixth generation of consoles (GameCube, PS2, original Xbox) all would fall under compared to the next generation that at least with the PS3 and Xbox 360 both largely tried to push a new “HD era”. But personally I still see the leap between 5th and 6th generation to be probably the biggest leap in graphical fidelity we’ve ever had and to me that makes it the end cap for the retro console.
Though I do know a bit of that is because of the jump to 3D did kinda take us back a few steps in graphics…
What’s wrong with her eye
That’s just not true.
Those are Link.
you shut your mouth right now
I can’t believe you’ve done this
…fuck
It’s ok, I don’t play Zelda. It’s more like I think Pokémon Blue was 10 years ago old but actually it was probably gen 4 (is that called Platinum?)
… I wish I hadn’t looked at Wikipedia now. Platinum was the third installment in gen 4 and that was 16 years ago. Apparently we’re up to gen 9 somehow
And I hate to tell you but gen 9 came out almost 3 years ago. We’re about due for gen 10
Pokemon X/Y was 11 years ago.
I don’t even know what X/Y is!
Visibly crumbles into dust from old age
Fuck off already.
I just got started working in a retro arcade.
It has a PS4 in it. 💀
That’s overkill.
Released over 11 years ago
But it’s also just the previous console generation and brand new ones were still in stores three years ago.
On that note, perhaps it would make more sense to look at when a console “dies off” than when it first released? In that sense, the PS4 is still a pretty recent console arguably still modern.
The Wii came out in 2009
It is pretty old
No it came out just a few years ago, I was just reading about it in Nintendo power the other day! God Twilight Princess is gonna be so sick when it finally comes out!
Right?
Right guys?!?
Its been 19 years between now and the release of the Xbox 360, while it was 9 years between the releases of the Xbox 360 and Nintendo 64.
I hate math
Why would you say something like that? It’s like you are wanting to hurt us.
I just find it fascinating how spans of time can feel so different
Anything that plays games on discs, including PlayStation, feels recent to me.
The are people living today who can remember the first video games.
If the idea of paintings was first invented two decades ago, you wouldn’t call any of it “retro”.
My grandparents remembered playing Pong.
I really ought to try Spacewar! sometime. Literally older than Jeopardy.
I remember playing pong too. Browser version of it, most recently about a year ago.
Shit, when I hear retro i think Atari
No retro means Atari, NES, Super Famicom, Genesis.
I’ve just got off of my 360 playing Halo 2. I was playing the level with the tank, Ladies Like Armour Plating. Very fun :)
Ah, the first chapter of Metropolis. One of my favorite sections. That chapter name actually depends on the difficulty setting. On easy and normal it’s ‘Ladies Like Armor Plating’ but on heroic it’s ‘Ladies Like Grinding Treads’ and on legendary it’s ‘Ladies Like Superior Firepower.’ I think it’s the only instance in the franchise of a chapter title changing based on difficulty.
I thought I’d remembered different names for it! I never made that connection though. I did try playing on Legendary this time around but it was too difficult. Halo 2 seems much harder than Reach, which was the last one I completed on Legendary. Maybe I’m just out of practice…
Halo 2 on legendary is absolutely brutal. The jackal snipers will one-shot you almost as soon as they spawn, so you need to memorize the spawn locations and triggers and make sure you have a BR to headshot them before they get into position.
