Unironically yes, technology has improved but we're forgetting things. Eventually the talented boomers will retire entirely never having passed on their wisdom since they've been working with outsourced simpletons and that knowledge will be lost forever.
>boomers will retire entirely never having passed on their wisdom
Why do they do this? Even my boomer parents didn't teach me shit. I had to learn it for myself the moment I was allowed to do shit myself when I moved out. They didn't even teach me how to cook and if I tried to cook when I still lived at home they'd stop me.
>I won't invest in my children >I will outsource my youth job >I will dismantle my union job >I will secure my pension >I will lower your wage >I will contract foreginers >I will open borders >I will jail you for having wrong opinions >I will abort your brother and sister >I won't leave you a penny >I won't hire your friends >I won't let you inherit my home >I will sell my home to foreign investors >I will sell the whole country too >I am boomer, eater of children >No generation had so much and money and left so little >Après moi, le deluge
Same. I never even did my own laundry until I was 18 years old and moved out because my mom wouldn't let me touch the machines. And my dad never taught me shit like how to talk to women, which has led to its own problems that I haven't figured out how to undo yet (I have like negative natural rizz).
Same. I never even did my own laundry until I was 18 years old and moved out because my mom wouldn't let me touch the machines. And my dad never taught me shit like how to talk to women, which has led to its own problems that I haven't figured out how to undo yet (I have like negative natural rizz).
Sounds relatable. One time my boomer mom tried to teach me how to cook but she was too afraid of letting me touch hot things and too frustrated that I didn't instantly get it. I ended up mostly teaching myself once I moved out.
Familial responsibility died with the greatest generation. They failed to teach it to their children, the boomers, so they think all they need to do is feed you, house you, and pay for your schooling until your 18, then they can be done with you. The failure of the education system (caused mostly by institutional corruption) lead to their useful knowledge not getting taught in schools.
Your boomer parents or gen x parents? Boomer parents by and large did an ok job, gen x is the shitty generation that either didn’t give a shit or were helicopter parents
my boomer parents basically were too tired to teach me shit so I learned everything the hard way and I still frick up basic shit because I base everything off watching other ppl and reading online
It's always the responsibility of the older generations to teach the new ones.
It's simply because boomers and some gen-x (it varies per country) grew up and entered adulthood in one of the best economic periods in recent history, the modern economic world was taking shape and everything was going up, wages were insanely good, real estate wasn't in as few hands as it is now, way less bureaucracy and people's shrinking wages weren't being siphoned into bloated governments to completely squander on dead-end projects as much as it is now.
Younger generations have been particularly aggressive towards and dismissive of boomers, whether that's justified or not, so I can't fully blame them for not wanting to take their time to teach a bunch of millennials who are just going to treat them like a punching bag the whole time and lecture them on their white privilege anyway.
Because western families throw their kids out of the house as soon as they turn 18 and only phone their kids to b***h. Utterly alien concept to other cultures and it's no fricking wonder the poor boomers are despised for their fricking moronic behaviour.
Asian families do not tie their kids to rent until they have enough to own the property. Eastern-Euro families do not tie their kids to rent until they have enough to own the property. Purely a moronic western thing that has damaged age relations almost irreparably.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Because western families throw their kids out of the house as soon as they turn 18 and only phone their kids to b***h.
I don't know why this dumb meme persists given the sheer number of 30-something millennials who still live at home with their parents in the USA, and the amount that lived at home well into their 20s. That hasn't been relevant since the early 90s. Generally speaking, the kids wanted to move out and gain their own independence as soon as possible, it was part of American culture and had nothing to do with hating your parents or vice versa. Life on your own was a lot more affordable back then and they wanted to enjoy being an adult on their own terms.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Because they want to throw their kids out, fail because there's nowhere for them to go and they spend a decade resenting each other.
Bird leaving the nest culture, very moronic. We aren't birds, Black person.
8 months ago
Anonymous
It simply comes down to the fact that Americans for the longest time valued independence while Europeons have been conditioned by centuries of authoritarian rule to favor a state of dependency. Living in your own house with your own car and doing whatever the frick you want beats living under mommy and daddy's roof well into adulthood, or at least it did when that was actually financially viable, and before America became overrun by brown hordes who voted in authoritarian politicians who promised them endless gibs.
>spoon feed me
i bet you didnt even fricking ask
and if they tried to get you to do shit you didnt want to you got pissy about it so they just gave up.
Just wait till the floodgates are fully opened and 3rd worlders pour into the mainstream western culture. We already have a little sample of what pajeets are capable of with starfield, though they were only used as a tool and didn't have too much creative input. But just imagine what awaits us...
Yeah partly this
And partly that the increase in things like early access or pre-release feedback from non-developers makes even the ones with talent and spine get forced into design by committee.
AI will actually fix this as one person or a small group will be able to create games alone to their vision without having so much money put into it that they have to appeal to the masses to make a profit.
AI will save gaming.
I rather believe they still hire creative and artistic skilled people. But there are linkedin approved scrum masters, agile processes, project leads, etc. in their way to reduce costs and be "more efficient". It kills not only the video game industry but basically anything involved with software. I'm working in a big software department and for each programmer or artists there are at least 1 project lead, several boards of tickets to work on and of course a scrum master to tell you what to do when. I hope this cancer work system fades as soon as possible. Artists and devs should equaliy build something together without shit tons of people from other fields to tell you what to do.
>the magical sorcerer steals all dragons from their realms, turning them into statues that a young dragon must go around and save >over whimsical
Black person come the frick on now
Too busy and noisy
Despite there being more detail from the technical standpoint, the first one is easier to parse what you're looking at from a quick glance
>Jesus frick what is that? >what could I possible be looking at?? >there’s entirely too much detail for me to determine that I am looking at a castle in a timely fashion >I guess I’ll never know what it is
Being this moronic
No issue at all. Just your average controonian Gankerirgin loser being irrational and thinking that anything that is old even though it looks like shit, makes it look automatically better than anything that came after it.
People who use word loser are not rational.
As they are either mindless fanatics obsessed with idealogical correctness or literal subhumans driven by instincts and reflexes.
One of the problems with remakes is that they tend to overcrowd what is shown. Certain setpieces are intended for promotional screenshots where they'll show just how much they've "improved" with the remake by showing every blade of grass and throwing in so many extra shades of colours that the original colour theory goes out the window.
That last point is always brought up with Spyro in particular because the devs made a rather significant point of it. The skyboxes are always the first thing because of how prominent they are, and everything else naturally follows.
>sky is prettier
not even that's true, as someone not boggled down and moronic from nostalgia like the rest of the thread, the top looks like shit even considering the era and bottom is an improvement but the game regardless of remake or original is still shit.
>not boggled down and moronic from nostalgia like the rest of the thread
It's got nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with visual design. Whether the PS1 game looks ugly is irrelevant to the problems.
I think Artisans was the best one to point out considering how much visual noise is added in to the scene and is actually quite disruptive in general when you can't even make out the cave clearly. The Spyro remakes tarnished the artstyle beyond repair.
>Cave is hard to see/find
More like I can't see it at fricking all. The pillars and castle looking like they're taken from the mountains themselves in the original is a huge deal too. Helps the world feel more connected, like of course theyd use the mountains to make their stone, there's a cave right there.
I got called a schizo for pointing out that the drastic deviation in artstyle effectively fricked many of the platforming elements or areas in the levels. Even if you were a diehard, shitposting contrarian or a TFB employee how can you defend mucking up the actual means of finding items or navigating levels?
Modern graphics whoring has ruined all visual clarity yes. To the point games have officially given up and covered everything in yellow paint or give you a partner that tells you exactly what to do every second.
People meme on navi being annoying but I don't remember her ever telling what I could and couldn't jump over.
>Cave is hard to see / find
Complete and utter bullshit that is completely made up from this particular perspective of this pic that you'd never have in the game itself. I played reignited not too long ago and you'll naturally notice the cave the moment you arrive at the top of the round pathway looking for what might be the main way from there and where the "off the beaten path" parts can be found. You'll see the unreachable cave (need speed power up to get there) and the huge cones that are still moving at the time and need to be stabilized.
>obsession with idealogical correctness >accusation of wrongthhink >anyone who doesn't think like me is moronic
People like you are souless shit, literally meat machines.
I have no nostalgia for Spyro, I didn't own a PS1. The top screen was clearly designed by someone actually trained as an artist, the bottom looks like plastic, generic Fortnite-esque tripe whipped up by some pajeet.
There is no issue, the OP is a moron as are most posters on Ganker and they should all be sterilized or executed. But none of that is new. The remake actually did ruin a couple levels but Autumn Plains isn't one of them
Bitches don't know about color theory >duplicate file
See
One of the problems with remakes is that they tend to overcrowd what is shown. Certain setpieces are intended for promotional screenshots where they'll show just how much they've "improved" with the remake by showing every blade of grass and throwing in so many extra shades of colours that the original colour theory goes out the window.
That last point is always brought up with Spyro in particular because the devs made a rather significant point of it. The skyboxes are always the first thing because of how prominent they are, and everything else naturally follows.
i just think developers working around limitations is more interesting than those who just dump un-optimised assets into their releases because "everyone has 200GB spare space for my game".
one takes skill and thought and makes you appreciate the work behind it more.
>boomers will retire entirely never having passed on their wisdom
Why do they do this? Even my boomer parents didn't teach me shit. I had to learn it for myself the moment I was allowed to do shit myself when I moved out. They didn't even teach me how to cook and if I tried to cook when I still lived at home they'd stop me.
not everyone is born a teacher, and most abstract ideas are very difficult to explain without knowing the the words
in a medium as new as video games, many of those words don't exist or are too occulted to be even professional knowledge
Gaslighters get the rope.
I will NOT be persuaded into doubting my own perception.
I will NOT be convinced that outsourced scrambled pajeet models with distorted art direction are superior to inhouse creativity and passion fueled by once young lads trying to push the envelope.
I will NOT reject what still holds up because art direction with a vision upholds fancy modern effects.
Frick you.
I think so, yes. The publishers pushed their talent too hard and made them leave in droves so they got replaced with fresh-out-of-college graduates. The ones with actual talent leave once they realize the bullshit they have to put up with, and the insane ones with no skill or even passion stay around to produce bland, samey games.
Graphical limitations in the past meant devs had to use different methods to portray something
Plus the fact it was harder to hide parts done like shit (for the time)
i dunno why toys for bob gets so much praise. their games look *fine*, i hate their character designs but the environments are meh. very hit and miss, particularly in the spyro remakes
i still dont understand why activision would abolish vicarious visions, a developer that made two well-beloved and well-received remaster that sold millions, while keeping toys for bob around, the devs so talented they ruined crash's reputation twice in a row
If you showed the bottom picture of the remake to (You)rself in 1999, your past self would piss his pants over how amazing it looks
Reality is that it looks fricking good, you're just stuck in nostalgia
t. bigger Spyro fan than you will ever be, still like the remakes
As a guy who only played the Sypro game on a ps 1 demo disc, should I play original Spyro games or remakes?
I'm not gonna do both since my backlog is too big
>Reality is that it looks fricking good, you're just stuck in nostalgia
Nope, I didn't even play Spyro much as a kid and I still think it's too cluttered. T4B have a big issue with making their games look too busy, particularly in Crash 4 where there are five hundred crates in each level, some of which you miss because they get obstructed by or blend in with the background. The fact that game needs a drop shadow outline says it all really.
My past self couldn't see what fits together and what is not, as my past self was inexperienced. People have a tendency to fine-tune their sense of style, harmony and integrity, especially if they constantly interact with various arts and styles, preferably not absent-mindedly.
Yet, if your only source of culture was latest AAA YOBA games, you tend to keep your evaluation of what you see based on the amount of details only without percepting mismatches.
I guess, you consider Legendary edition of Mass Effect the pinnacle of visuals.
Kids are easily wowed. The fact that you're still wowed by superficiality instead of finesse is proof that your brain is underdeveloped.
The appreciation for something like psx graphics and style comes with age.
There's another explanation: that you're a goddamn zoomie. In which case, there’s not much else to say.
I would say it looks more detailed but theres a complete lack of artistic flare or interpretation. If you want something comparable, think of all the shitty Hannah Barbera cartoons that kept popping up endlessly or 80's action ones. They all looked the same, had the same plots or stiff animations, the same bad voice-acting and so on.
Actually no I had this exact internal discussion with myself way back when. I was reading some gaming magazine in a store while the rest of my family shopped and I remember seeing those shitty mockups of some "hyper-realistic" video game of the future and I knew then and there I never wanted games where every single object on the screen is overly shined and polished bullshit with a bazillion details spread around taking away your attention from the actual fricking game. Anybody who actually takes games seriously never wanted this. The time they'd take to make it look like that means it went away from the actually important parts of development: the game
More details your brain doesn't have time to register doesn't make the visuals better, even if it looks more realistic. Rendering every leaf and grass polygon doesn't add much to the bigger picture.
It's not just an issue of talent, but also a matter of taste. There's been a huge collapse in people's tastes on average in the last twenty years.
Only the most profoundly stupid homosexual who grew up watching 21st century 3d animated shlock would think bottom looks good.
reddit morality, deviantart, and furry porn has nuked a lot of potential devs brains. also the nerd demographic has become much more liberal compared to the late 90s which lowered artistic standards and gatekeeping. slop humans can only create slop
They worked with less and tried to make it more. The remakes are butthurt developers salty that they have to remake something so they try and add in their own visuals/ values. The art is wrong in the Spyro remakes. The lighting fricking sucks and doesn't capture that twilight dusk of levels the use of colors are so off it's upsetting to people who enjoy art understand the importance of protecting original visions.Those hacks used modern lighting and over exposed everything, but it's 30000000 polys now so everything is crisp and clean. Frick them.
Genuinely, yes. Look at the fricking state of so many games on release these days, too many of them can't even launch as fully functional products.
In thinking about your posted image, I'd still say yes, the old necessity to "do more with less" shows a higher level of skill and creativity.
I don't get it, some of you are upset that... Developers don't need to go through extra bullshit to make a good looking game??
The remake looks fantastic baring questionable character designs (i.e Spike's new look) but otherwise, the levels, homeworlds, and music (75% of it) is great.
I understand that, but reignited wasn't an original creation. They were working off of what the old devs had already made. They took creative liberties with some redesigns, some I don't like, others I do, but really what else were they supposed to get creative with? What limitations did they need to surpass?
I wanna hear legitimate grievances people have with reignited because genuinely I'd rather have it than not, I can go back and play the old trilogy any time, reignited is as if I were living through my childlike imagination.
I dislike its overall warmer colour palette but that's because i prefer cooler colours. The deep megentas and purples of the old look added to the dream like look it had.
>the levels, homeworlds
See the article posted earlier about color theory and Spyro. The levels and homeworlds don't look good or even close to correct in a lot of scenarios. A lot of it is outright just careless if you actually paid attention to what you were playing. It's not just character design they got wrong.
I last ran through reignited in 2018 so I don't remember the specifics on the colors and hues, but the level layouts and remastered models. Still that's a fair assessment.
Reignited is like playing the game with other's imagination rather than your own. This is why movie adaptations never work either. There is a lot to lose between translation and interpretation.
There is not a single redesign I enjoy from reignited, except for those that translate the designs faithfully and little else which are few and far between. Same goes for color palettes, the entire game is tinted in weird hues because they can't have creative colors due to using realtime lighting.
There is nothing good about this version for me. It is obviously a good game because it's built on the backbone of three excellent games but it captured none of the magic.
Elora and Bianca are the only standout "improvements" to me personally.
The remakes were outsourced to third-worlders and every level and character looks like something out of Planet Sheen.
Because they went really try hard on "humanoid" faces for npcs and enemies that REALLY did not need it. Like
Like I said, reignited is fantastic to me just because it's more Spyro in a familiar environment, but it's obviously not perfect. I just also think it's not fair to say that it's BAD.
>Elora and Bianca are the only standout "improvements" to me personally.
I loved what they did with Ripto and his henchmen. Ripto especially looks more reptilian and being slimmed down adds more to his napoleon complex. Overall, the three are improved over the originals, Gnasty is an inoffensive 1:1 recreation of the original but touched up in HD, and the Sorceress was botched completely.
8 months ago
Anonymous
having replayed spyro 2 just a week ago that image is physically repulsive
Reignited is like playing the game with other's imagination rather than your own. This is why movie adaptations never work either. There is a lot to lose between translation and interpretation.
There is not a single redesign I enjoy from reignited, except for those that translate the designs faithfully and little else which are few and far between. Same goes for color palettes, the entire game is tinted in weird hues because they can't have creative colors due to using realtime lighting.
There is nothing good about this version for me. It is obviously a good game because it's built on the backbone of three excellent games but it captured none of the magic.
I'm annoyed with remakes existing at all. Trying to build on top of an already existing work that has nothing wrong with it, rather than attempting to create something as good from scratch, is lazy from the start. I don't think a thing deserves praise for the most notable part of it being needless overcomplication.
Spyro has been rebranded so much it almost feels deliberate. They tried to make him a serious chosen one Frodo/analogue and it didn't work. They tried to make him overly silly and ugly for a literal toddler's toy commercial and that lasted a few years. Then the remakes happened and TFB ruined Crash and got sent to the COD mines like VV and Beenox. Really at this point Activision should just sell the IP.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Are you dumb? Crash remake was good.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Crash 2 was butchered beyond repair
8 months ago
Anonymous
Spyro remake was good. Crash remake less so. No neutral slide spin.
8 months ago
Anonymous
The Crash remake fricked up not only the art style but the hitbox
8 months ago
Anonymous
For the most part, but rounded edges in a platformer was moronic. Road to Nowhere went from being a decent yet precarious level to the hardest in the game. 1 and 2 shouldn't have had relics either.
8 months ago
Anonymous
The only thing I liked was time trials for 1-2 even if some of them were annoying as sin.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>frick up the physics and hitboxes in a platformer >don't fix all the significant problems the original trilogy had
No.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>give Crash 1 a save system like 2 and 3 >give it an autosave slot so you can't even save 4 files like the originals
The only actual improvement they gave 1 is still inferior to the version in the originals. Incredible.
I agree with you on that, but I believe if they can't produce a quality game then the series deserves to die rather than being propped up with nostalgia bait.
From a gameplay standpoint, they unlocked the framerate but your jump is shit above 30, I beat the entire first game at about 144fps and I had no idea why the game was so fricking annoying with the jumps.
Graphically, it doesn't invoke the old feel of Spyro games. Environments are too busy, trees and basic structures now all look like they came out of fricking Tangled. It's very wannabe Pixar, characters look weird, the dragons I saved looked like deviant art shit. It's so fricking bizarre because Spyro himself looks amazing but every other character is such a departure or downgrade.
Finally the voice acting is worse, it doesn't feel like whoever did the direction understood the original.
>the levels, homeworlds
See the article posted earlier about color theory and Spyro. The levels and homeworlds don't look good or even close to correct in a lot of scenarios. A lot of it is outright just careless if you actually paid attention to what you were playing. It's not just character design they got wrong.
I'm looking between these images and I can't stand the saturation of color with the remake. It's so jarring. The colors are like, fantasy baby blue but they're also so fricking strong.
Because the engine does it for them. Rare's culling approach at the time was self programmed and why they were able to push the N64s graphic fidelity further than their competitors.
Going on noclip (dot) website and just turning the vertex colors on/off on scenes shows how much work vcolors put in back in the day. I don't know of many people who did them dynamically on the level of Rare however, most games just baked them in.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Tomb raider does it for underwater sections too
8 months ago
Anonymous
Oh yeah, I always thought it was textures for some reason like how OOT does it.
I really wonder if they had some sort of tool that helped them do it, because hand painting every vertex animation like that seems like it would takes weeks. The banjo one is particularly crazy because it changes colors and shades, not just one or the other.
Yes, but youre an idiot if you think rando third party devs had culling as efficient as what Rare had. It wasn't some magic coincidence Rare games look better than shit like blues brothers.
Your ability to optimize the tech was as important as your artistic skills at the time.
Other than Spyro, that simply has uninspired artistic vision, the vidya industry simply suffers from being a high effort job paid like shit, with horrible working hours.
If you're a smart person with good software engineering skills, you get into fintech, cybersecurity, banking, insurance etc. for great working hours, benefits and higher salary.
If you want to develop games, you can do it on the side as an indie, there's no fricking plus to working in a big software house.
Yes, but mostly because the studios refuse to hire more talented people because they cost more and demand better conditions. There are still talented people, but they go into other industries because AAA video game studios are abusive as hell.
Crash remakes > Spyro remakes
Vicarious Visions did a better job at it than Toys for Bob. Sure there were a few hiccups or very small loss of things in some sections of the game which people still complain about, but overall it felt much more faithful towards the spirit of Crash in my opinion.
>yeah they made some bad decisions
I just want to demonstrate to you that I'm not cherry picking by showing another example. These were all very intentional visual design decisions with Insomniac. Whoever made this remake was not paying attention to any of the original art design documents. They likely never even consulted anyone who worked with the studio.
that happens with almost all remakes sadly, we want to be better and different than those before and we are fed by those that would called us names if we just copy pasted the same stuff with improved graphics.
its sad but its the same thing with book adaptations being unfaithful.
>graphic limitations made them look that way, >this that I'm doing now is what they really intended and what they would've done having today's resources
its basically modern hubris
>graphical limitations made them that way
Exactly, so that's how they planned the presentation on. You'll still never be able to explain the lack of pink in Magic Crafters, unless you want to die on the hill that the remakes had proper art direction. They didn't.
Not the case here since you clearly do because you posted it anon, but I refuse to engage in conversation with anyone that doesn’t understand this image. Talking with dumb people makes my brain hurt
What's crazy is how much they change colors needlessly. For example, look at the green on the buildings, it's blue now for no reason. Why did they decide to do different colors is a big question. Lighting, stuff like the ground it sucks but I can kind of understand it but why do they always always always change the color of the man-made structures?
Most of these complaints are nonsensical, but this one is just plain wrong. Oversaturated color is the work of an amateur, which Insomniac Games was when working on Spyro, their first game. Inb4 some homosexual tries to claim it's a cartoony style. Frick you. Learn some basic color theory.
>shit looks like an overwatch map
kek, that's 100% on the money >that fricking sunset castle
i dont know how they made such a warm, inviting environment look like a hell world but they did it. holy shit toys for bob, end yourselves.
Id only argue that the in the first map could very easily be an afternoon skybox. the pink colors arent fantasy per se, some afternoon evening skies have those colors.
>complaining about the door on the castle
How do they leave the castle to go to what is clearly the attached courtyard then? Just hop through a window?
People act like I'm irrational for liking the original more, the games from this studio had their own art direction which Bluepoint ignored, I've seen the "if they had the technology then it would have looked like the remake" but that's not true, it'd look like The Last Guardian
Oh no it isn't at all, it's very well known that Wander has a very stiff and inexpressive face in the remake, meanwhile he does move his eyes around in the original, which is easy to miss thanks to the game's low resolution in original hardware, he's got a very wax like appearance, the game is also at times too green and lively, it's supposed to be a dead, empty and desolate land
original is obviously artistically superior and it isn't rose tinted glasses because i stopped playing the game after the third collosi when i rented it when it came out. i don't like the gameplay at all.
Because back then they had limited graphics/textures and had to rely on artstyle/artistic vission, a skill that have being lost along being able to reduce the size of games.
I think the remake devs did the best they could, but you simply cannot achieve the same mysterious, dreamy feeling that the originals had with modern graphics. They pushed the bounds of the PS1 and used a dozen little tricks that let your mind fill in the details when you couldn't have more than a few polygons per object, but with the ability to put more detail per square inch into a game these days, your mind no longer needs to guess and imagine the missing details, so the magic of the originals was lost from day 1.
What was the last game that came out that actually had a distinct, iconic artstyle? Cuphead? It feels like we haven’t had a game that actually created something new on the levels of older games, even now people still talk about the visuals of Crash and Spyro despite being 25+ year old games.
It's not just the visuals. I tried the remake, and I couldn't get into it. Something with the camera, maybe the zoom level or FoV, kept throwing me off. It feels worse to play, and I struggle to put my finger on exactly why
>gems in the original were perfection
And they removed the gems collected animation at the end of every level while traveling back to the hub world. Sure it's only a small detail, but it's all the little things that actually start piling up when you get this many things wrong in the first place. This could be forgivable if the presentation on everything wasn't so off.
>Sure it's only a small detail
Small details make the game. They're frequently the difference between a good version and a bad version of the same concept or genre, or, like in this case, of the same game
>gems in the original were perfection
And they removed the gems collected animation at the end of every level while traveling back to the hub world. Sure it's only a small detail, but it's all the little things that actually start piling up when you get this many things wrong in the first place. This could be forgivable if the presentation on everything wasn't so off.
This reminds me that I was pissed that in 2 they removed things like 1-up chests and redesigned chests and gems to the point of removing blue gems in favor of a more indigo-ish tone.
They had the life-butterfly jars so they didn’t really remove them. I like both designs personally.
I’m not sure where I stand on the 1-up mechanics (get lives from killing enemies you’ve already encountered vs. farming sheep). I think I prefer Spyro 1, in terms of it having actual risk/reward. But I can understand how 2 is better for kids, and preferable for that reason. Interesting to consider how both in cases, if you are good at the game, you mainly get lives from the chests/jars.
Yes. Most devs back in the day were seasoned programmers and had to learn the technology they were given. There was no google or stack overflow in 1994. Either you knew what you were doing or you had to look through a 2000 page manual to find it.
Modern devs feel like that quote from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park at times. So much random bullshit and noise added in just for the sake of it.
Most AAA studios now a days have 200+ people working on a game. How can you have a single creative vision like that?
Well what do you think if they were able to put awesome games on 700mb cds and had very few pre-made assets in their possession except maybe some basic soundpacks? I also recall that games like Spyro or Crash were supposed to be nearly impossible to run on PS1 but turns out they weren't.
I'm not even one to cherry pick remakes endlessly, but with Spyro's case the technical limitations were quite literally the intentional art design of the game. They had to come up with creative solutions to the problems with visual design at that time. There's plenty of games out there of where you can't say the same or where the developers have clearly communicated as to why it was done, in many cases it could be seen as ambiguous at best.
Yep. They had to think of solutions for problems where "Buy better hardware" wasn't an option.
RAM not fast enough to load the whole instance? Restart the console everytime.
Not even diskspace on Memory Card in the day? Rely of passcodes that player input to return to stages in the game.
Limited space on a cd disc? Make two cd's and have the player input the other one when they get to that stage.
Need to add a wow factor that impresses gamers? Don't hire more asset creation and celebrity actors. Make the player use the 2nd controller slot on the console as an actual game mechanic.
i've heard stories modern game engines like the latest unreal thing basically does a lot of work for you. i'm ignorant on such things ultimately though. but i'm inclined to believe it because video games fricking suck now.
Back then, devs had to pretty much create everything from scratch. For this, they needed to do more work and understand how the systems worked. What they then made (engine, tools, art, etc...), was fine tuned for their game and vision. During this process, they gained a lot of valuable experience, created a strong team because teamwork was absolutely nessecary, and knowledge.
Compare that to now where everything is available to you online. You don't need to create anything. The systems are all there.
Engine? Just use unreal or unity.
Art?
Just buy it online and tweak it or hire someone on the other side of the world to do it for you. Someone who only cares about getting paid, aren't part of the dev team per se, and has no understanding or caring of what their art is really for.
Modern devs essentially put together something from other people's work.
This way, devs get no experience, no understanding of how the engine and the systems work, and they don't create a strong team because they don't need to.
Then there are the over reliance on 3D tools. Sure they are great, but again you won't understand the underlying systems if you just drag shit across the screen and put in some numbers into a pre made text box.
Zoomers aren't allowed to comment on threads about visuals.
Blizzard makes ugly games in general, but the remaster is the lesser of two evils in this case. >way too much contrast >every color competes to be the most vivid and intense >no real unifying visual theme
Starcraft II and WoW are unironically their best-looking games. Not saying much though.
>it's too cartoony but it's also trying to be realistic
nostalgiabrains, everyone
>tries to look more real >ends up looking like a cartoon
What's so hard to understand?
Drives me up the fricking wall when some dumb c**t says it's harder to make games than it ever has been. I could throw together a game about a black dude throwing flaming fried chicken at police in less than a weekend with 4 levels, music, sound, and a leaderboard, just by firing up unreal and dropping in a bunch of bullshit. They're pretending they do soooo much work to shovel out another annual helping of "snarky young adventurer saves the world and preaches kindness while collecting bullshit" 2, when the only reason that feels like work is that it's the only thing more tedious than playing their shitty games.
I think this is the only skybox that managed to be even somewhat sort of remotely correct compared to the others, yet it still lacks the contrast of many other shades in the scene. Really just even changing those clouds to orange would be enough to push it further.
Something people need to understand is all the people who made games like spyro good left ages ago. The current holders of any given IP like this aren't the same people who made the games you like. Blizzard is another example.
>Imagine thinking the top looks better
If we're judging what the level looks like outside the hardware that it's running on, yes. I do think the original looks better.
Go read up what developers had to do to get the top working. Cache and memory were limited on the PS1 so they basically had to micromanage streaming chunks of of the levels. Absolute wizards.
Took me a moment to recognize this was midday gardens lol
Why would all the colour get all fricked with a glitch like that?
adding detail doesn't mean they're striving for realism
Not necessarily, that’s true. But I do think the way they handle the environment looks dull because it looks more realistic. Eg. The colours of the rocks, mountains, sky and lights… Another example is the the smoggy distance fog they add seemingly at random to some levels.
Yes you use an emulator after patching spyro 1.0 with it but the mod is not for everyone xD It has new textures, skyboxes and music, but the gameplay itself includes speedrunning tricks and exploits. I almost gave up the whole thing before I got 10 eggs but I ended up playing until I got 80 eggs to see the credits.
Neat. I’ll give a try. >speedrunning tricks
Lol I only know the double jump in Spyro 2 and a few wallgliding glitches in spyro 1. How fricked am I?
8 months ago
Anonymous
You will use save states and you will look up on youtube how to proceed but you will make it... I played the green spyro one which is the actual challenge, there's apparently a red spyro tourist version available which I guess let's you find the level completion portal guy easier, but I don't recommend.
Things didn't get bad until around the turn of the millennia, after the hyper capitalism of the late 80s finally started showing its long term side effects.
Nah. The lead artists who did the concept drawings for the Spyro remake are legitimately really talented, and have artstyles that would have done really well for a remake. The remakes were shit because they were incredibly low-budget and all the finalized 3D modeling work was outsourced to an indian sweatshop that couldn't get the really nice, soft gradients that a lot of the concept art had. There was also a lot of management frickery; the guy who designed the ugly remake Gnorcs, for example, also drew concept art of them looking far more in-line with the originals, but had to make the more grotesque design instead at management's direction.
Nobody sets out to make a shit game. Management sets out to maximize profit margins. These things are usually at odds with eachother, especially since in the western game industry that means nobody stays at one job long enough to get any in-depth experience; one of the lead animators on Jak 1-3 had to work on some Puzzle Bobble VR shovelware title recently, for example, because nobody else is hiring cartoony 3D modelers and animators. It's all outsourced now.
definitely the emulator. i never owned a ps1 as a kid and am really impressed with spyro 1-3 after trying them as an adult. beautiful games with as much of a special feel as OoT. It's worth it man.
Play the originals. The remakes aren't bad, but they're worse. Par for the course, really, and it's a shame because the remakes could really have been good if they didn't outsource almost all of the 3D work.
Yeah, that's par for the course with just about every model in the remake. Even the ones that weren't outsourced to Indian sweatshops were given to random contractors without much direct oversight, so they look "off compared to the concept" at best and completely shit at worst. Even the better ones miss out on the really lovely soft gradients that define the look of both Devon Cady-Lee and Nicholas Kole's designs, so they all look like weirdly chunky fortnite models. It's a shame.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Feels like they were going for a design that they hoped would inspire lots of deviant art porn of, but they forgot to make them look appealing to begin with
8 months ago
Anonymous
I don't really agree. The concept art genuinely looks really appealing, and I say this as someone with no desire to frick any of the characters.
Notably, Devon Cady-Ler also worked on Gigantic, a (now dead) multiplayer game that I actually think did the Spyro 1-3 artstyle WAY better. A lot of the maps had this really cool painterly look to them and the character models were all done in-house so they got his designs far closer to the concepts.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I don't really agree. The concept art genuinely looks really appealing, and I say this as someone with no desire to frick any of the characters.
Notably, Devon Cady-Ler also worked on Gigantic, a (now dead) multiplayer game that I actually think did the Spyro 1-3 artstyle WAY better. A lot of the maps had this really cool painterly look to them and the character models were all done in-house so they got his designs far closer to the concepts.
Here's a screenshot as an example. The maps in Gigantic were directed by Lisa Fleck, the same chick who did the environment art for Slime Rancher. I wish they'd gotten her for the Spyro remakes because god damn the softer, less chunky details just work so much better.
the only fanbase on this website that I've ever seen shill for remakes is the pokemon fanbase, but they've been conditioned for most of their life to be consoomers
I loved it back when devs had to work around the limitations of current hardware rather than what we have now. Optimization was king back then. There are few cases like that today.
people were hired for expertise and passion
people are now hired for diversity and cults
people used to push their tools to the max and then find ways to go beyond the intended use
people now use premade shit to throw things together
Yes. You actually had to have programming skills and a brain >making shit fit into memory (a few KBs) >when memory was tight, you had to resort workarounds like lookup tables >limited CPU budget meant you had to make every cycle count >you couldn't just load 20MB texture files from a 3D scanner to make a game look good >art direction was important. you couldn't just slap ugly bloom and filters on everything >games were made by the same people who played them
games are harder to make now
look at this screenshot for example. a modern game can't have trees that are literally just rectangles with a sphere on top
Competency crisis, the west, especially America, started caring less about standardized test scores and merit. Now you get people in positions who got there on a handicap because theyre of some minority group of race or sexual identity due to the civil rights movement and affirmative action at both educational institutions and their employment. Explaining the competency crisis goes smoothly and everyone agrees untill that last sentence, as its a hard pill to swallow.
Funny how this started specifically because minorities kept scoring low on standardized tests no matter how much money and effort was spent uplifting them and regardless of socioeconomic background. Rather than just admit the obvious, they had to drag everyone else down because leftism is essentially a religion.
No, this all started because programs stopped focusing on helping people and started prioritizing equality of outcome (i.e. communism: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need).
Of course it will never work because it all comes down to people staying honest, which there's no real incentive to do (see prisoner's dilemma, principal-agent problem).
Like I said, its a hard pill to swallow. Some people would rather let their lives degrade than concede a fundamental part of their ego. Alot of people. Its why its important to choose your battles and not get overly invested in something you know little about.
>Competency crisis
Stop with this buzzword. Competent people still exist. The problem is competent people have been pushed aside to make room for diversity hires. >standardized test scores
Cancer. You can't measure intelligence via test scores. All you get are people who're skilled at passing tests. >the civil rights movement
Oh no, people are abusing something? better repeal it instead of fixing it! btw kys. >affirmative action
This never made sense. It's just racism but against people who're accused of being racist.
>You can't measure intelligence via test scores. All you get are people who're skilled at passing tests.
This is room temperature IQ cope. You're brown and am*rican.
>defending education as signaling
morons like you who outsource employee training to college are the reason why even mopping the floor requires a BSc nowadays.
All a college degere does is prove that you were diligent enough to withstand 4 years of grueling desk work. It doesn't prove that you're the next Einstein or Stephen Hawking.
Yes it is. There are a myriad of jobs paywalled behind a college degree that don't actually require the skills it certifies. All because boomers are too lazy to actually screen employees.
SAT is a joke. It's a function of base intelligence + the time you spend preparing for it. So a median IQ midwit with grit could spend months preparing and outperform a high IQ who didn't prepare at all. That being said the high IQ could prepare in much less time and score higher, but more than likely the high IQ is interested in other things that are more stimulating. It's harder for them to stay interested in rote tasks.
Yes you can. SAT is funny enough correlates quite strongly to iq, but its not meant as a measure of intelligence its a measure of if you learned anything.
>You can't measure intelligence via test scores
Lol. Yes you can.
>You can't measure intelligence via test scores. All you get are people who're skilled at passing tests.
This is room temperature IQ cope. You're brown and am*rican.
Standardized tests need to exist to make sure people meet the standards for a particular job. They don't tell you much about somebody's potential for growth, people skills, etc, and those are important too. There needs to be a human aspect to evaluation.
I want to live in a society where a talented veteran chooses apprentices from a pool of qualified candidates, using a shared cultural background to evaluate their potential as human beings, like his boss did for him.
You want to live in a world where only Asians can get ahead because their parents brainhacked them for rote memorization from a young age. They have always been better at that because it's hard-baked into their culture. But those cultures didn't produce the airplane, the TV, the ticking clock... Westerners did that with the work culture I just described.
In a historical scale I am the conservative and you the progressive on this issue.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I'm a white nationalist. Why don't you say what you really mean instead of libtard gobbly asiatic. You want an all white workforce because they're the master race.
The solution is simple: get rid of the shitters. >meritocracy
It's a meme. It only results in morons chasing after high scores, glory hounds, resume padders, bean counters, etc.
Hell, the reason video games are shit nowadays is precisely because of ~~*metrics-driven*~~ development. Goodhart's Law illustrates this perfectly.
Sometimes, yeah, when metrics become a target its a matter of time before it becomes increasingly game'd by people, some metrics are easier to exploit by design and can delay both the severity of their inevitable exploitation and delay the invention of said exploits. Id say it doesent discredit the existence of metrkcs being useful. Just that they arent permanently monolithic.
Keep chasing after those ~~*KPIs*~~, I'm sure your boss will pat you on the back for making the line go higher on the powerpoint presentation to convince suckers to invest in the next pozfest that will "take the gaming world by storm."
A tool can't fix shitty people.
I don't normally doompost, but yes. Working within a narrow limit really does breed creativity. With inflated budgets and gigantic work teams, modern devs can basically just afford to do everything with no regards to actual creative work.
And indies are no better. 99% of them just chase whatever is trending, hence the glut of scary-world-small-child games, walking sims, and open-world, survival, horror crafting games. And the ones who aren't chasing these genres are instead making games that intentionally look like shit while rubbing one out to their "retro aesthetic" while forgetting that retro games actually had fricking effort put into them, not just three rectangles that you call a sprite.
>Were developers from the past more talented
this is my uninformed opinion but wasn't it just a select few talented programmers carrying the space back in the day? we still have talented indie devs around here and there. I wish more devs from the past came out of their cave to develop new games but that didn't work out the past few times it happened.
Not really, but I get why it would look that way.
Games in the past, even AAA games, needed like a dozen people or less to make. However in these cases all 12 people were extremely skilled and knowledge, since you had to be.
You would struggle to find even 12 new people at a modern studio with the talent of these older groups, despite team sizes being in the 100s now.
>compared to N64 slop spyro was pixar movie
Mario 64 had much better looking characters/enemies than this and it was Nintendo's first attempt at modeling 3D characters
>the PS1 had shit specs
And yet every good looking game from the generation is PS1-only or looks like shit on the N64
8 months ago
Anonymous
here's your draw distance, bro
8 months ago
Anonymous
looks like shit on N64
8 months ago
Anonymous
The filtering was in-engine and literally considered a feature, for some reason.
Looked fine on CRT tube tvs, I guess.
8 months ago
Anonymous
N64's in-engine texture filtering has aged... very badly, but it didn't need to rip out entire chunks of polygon rendering just to get the minimum amount of CPU to render models, with such wasteful allocation that the best games infamously hacked the PS1 itself to get the minimum specs they needed.
here's your draw distance, bro
Draw distance is a little easier when your hardware texture res is hard-capped to 64x64
8 months ago
Anonymous
The PS1 can't even render textures properly in the first place, it wasn't powerful enough.
8 months ago
Anonymous
a total non issue on duckstation, in fact emulated psx games look at least one whole generation better than emulated N64 games.
yes of course. it used to be that nerds made video games, now half the frickwads who would have gone for a medical degree for the money go into software dev instead. no passion
>5 years later >Ganker is still "old good, new bad" seething over Reignited >and suddenly everyone is an art major babbling on about MUH COLOR THEORY
you know your game is good when the only nitpicks Ganker can find are "uhhh muh soul"
>you know your game is good when
your game is hot garbage if you remake the exact same game with questionable improvements.
They sell those games for up to 100% full price.
You could remake something like a Crash Bash by adding an online mode and upscale the graphics and that's all you have to do. You sell this for $20 dollar and cut even after 5000 copies
yes and its easy to prove
developers then >understand the hardware and system they are working on to a high degree >usually serve multi functions >involved in the design process >need to figure themselves how to implement certain stuff >full control of the engine and able to make adjustments on every abstraction layer
developers now >only understand an abstract level of the tools they are working with >work on a single secluded thing >often just a cog in the machine of the creation process >implement stuff by best practice, google solutions and use pre-made assets and functions >has to manipulate the configurable part of the engine, hacks work only on top of the engine
current gamdevs are essentially sculpters and rarely creators anymore
i don't like that they use the subtle fog/haze effect to make things look further away because it's much less convincing than the low lod look the original had and it makes the the levels feel smaller
also ironic that a remake of spyro the dragon would have this problem with fog considering that the original is famous for getting rid of the fog while having expansive detailed levels
The problem is access and volume. In the 80-95 the people making games were giga nerds and as such carried a much bigger toolbox and wider array of ideas. In 95-2007ish the middle generation of people who had access to far better technologies still got mentored by incredibly talented people. Should be simple enough so see what happened next. The hoard start development because it is accessible and as always the unwashed mass ruin everything
used to be made in some makeshift office or warehouse god knows where >made by people who were insane enough to dedicate their life and craft to an experimental new medium >everything was custom built from scratch by in-house employees >the stuff that wasn't was sourced from some obscure texture/sample CDs you had to hunt down at specialized markets >OST was made by some guy named Stewart or Satoshi >little to no oversight from the suits so the bro culture in the office was free to experiment with the budget >got away with putting wild shit in the games >absolutely no expectations either for what the game plays like or how much money it will make so you never knew what you were getting >tons of idiosyncrasies from all the various people that experimented and had input in the game with various skill levels, ideas, life experiences etc >there was always a rough off-beat vibe to anything, even the most mainstream offerings had a curious unique identity >visuals and music and gameplay approaches varied wildly from studio to studio and everything had its own personality since each of the devs reality seeped into their work
Nowadays it goes one of two ways >made in an uptight California/Tokyo office by people who are only there for the paycheck, with either realistic or anime visuals, generic orchestra OST by some famous homosexual plagiarist, using existing software and outsourcing the rest to continental asian sweatshops, micromanaged to soullessness by committee design, every inch is sanitized to appeal to the maximum possible audience, and all the games feel the same despite being made by different studios at different points in time because they're only inspired by other games that sold well and no one with a vision is allowed to interfere
or >made by a sole literal mentally ill homosexual in his room using free software and a laughable attempt at pixelshit where the gameplay is just a vehicle for his propaganda and a poor copy of an existing old game
>little to no oversight from the suits so the bro culture in the office was free to experiment with the budget >absolutely no expectations either for what the game plays like or how much money it will make so you never knew what you were getting
you have to be outrageously moronic to believe this.
Because back in the day, a single artist had control of an entire level's art and could make it exactly as they and the director wanted.
Now, art is treated like programming, a largely collaborative effort where the individual's vision doesn't matter and everyone is just looking for "good enough" to get over the high demand workload modern gamedev requires.
AI is actually exciting to me for this precise reason. One man could make games back then easily enough because the standards and expectations were lower in terms of graphics, but one man can't make an AAA title today as there's just too much to do. these are games that take teams of 500 people 5 years and $150 million to produce and they end up soulless as a result due to having to appeal to the widest most casualized market possible to turn profit, appease stockholders, etc, but AI will reach a point where it enables talented and passionate individuals to once again create whatever is considered to be AAA-quality at that time games, by themselves or in very small teams.
Doubt that's going to happen outside of a few passionate individuals, my man, AI has already been integrated into AAA/commercial workflow with technicians and they're just being used to do the same disparate visionless shit, just faster. They've already lowered people's expectations for quality and don't want to raise them.
AI won't do that so you can stop shilling it. AI will only enable more soulless products because it's tailor made for corporate boards and made by committee.
It's not even a debate, objectively speaking the N64 had the superior hardware and visual fidelity. This is quantifiable. It's why Sony leaned so hard into the "WOAH DUDE LOOK AT THE CGI CUTSCENES" angle to distract from the awful in-engine visuals.
I dunno, the cartridge medium created a lot of unnecessary limitations. Had they gone with CDs as well, then Nintendo might have achieved a console gaming monopoly before Microsoft even had a chance to join into the fray.
Unironically yes, technology has improved but we're forgetting things. Eventually the talented boomers will retire entirely never having passed on their wisdom since they've been working with outsourced simpletons and that knowledge will be lost forever.
>boomers will retire entirely never having passed on their wisdom
Why do they do this? Even my boomer parents didn't teach me shit. I had to learn it for myself the moment I was allowed to do shit myself when I moved out. They didn't even teach me how to cook and if I tried to cook when I still lived at home they'd stop me.
they are the cronos generation
Underrated
>I won't invest in my children
>I will outsource my youth job
>I will dismantle my union job
>I will secure my pension
>I will lower your wage
>I will contract foreginers
>I will open borders
>I will jail you for having wrong opinions
>I will abort your brother and sister
>I won't leave you a penny
>I won't hire your friends
>I won't let you inherit my home
>I will sell my home to foreign investors
>I will sell the whole country too
>I am boomer, eater of children
>No generation had so much and money and left so little
>Après moi, le deluge
>my boomer parents didn't teach me shit
Same. I never even did my own laundry until I was 18 years old and moved out because my mom wouldn't let me touch the machines. And my dad never taught me shit like how to talk to women, which has led to its own problems that I haven't figured out how to undo yet (I have like negative natural rizz).
How old are you now?
Sounds relatable. One time my boomer mom tried to teach me how to cook but she was too afraid of letting me touch hot things and too frustrated that I didn't instantly get it. I ended up mostly teaching myself once I moved out.
Familial responsibility died with the greatest generation. They failed to teach it to their children, the boomers, so they think all they need to do is feed you, house you, and pay for your schooling until your 18, then they can be done with you. The failure of the education system (caused mostly by institutional corruption) lead to their useful knowledge not getting taught in schools.
Your boomer parents or gen x parents? Boomer parents by and large did an ok job, gen x is the shitty generation that either didn’t give a shit or were helicopter parents
Boomer parents were bad teachers and didn't leave anything behind for future generations. You're right on Gen X though
>try to pass on your knowledge
>yeah ok boomer
>wtf stop mansplaining to me! Rape!
You get what you deserve
my boomer parents basically were too tired to teach me shit so I learned everything the hard way and I still frick up basic shit because I base everything off watching other ppl and reading online
>Why do they do this?
It's a chicken and egg cycle of "you never asked" and "you never taught me there was anything to ask"
It's always the responsibility of the older generations to teach the new ones.
It's simply because boomers and some gen-x (it varies per country) grew up and entered adulthood in one of the best economic periods in recent history, the modern economic world was taking shape and everything was going up, wages were insanely good, real estate wasn't in as few hands as it is now, way less bureaucracy and people's shrinking wages weren't being siphoned into bloated governments to completely squander on dead-end projects as much as it is now.
Younger generations have been particularly aggressive towards and dismissive of boomers, whether that's justified or not, so I can't fully blame them for not wanting to take their time to teach a bunch of millennials who are just going to treat them like a punching bag the whole time and lecture them on their white privilege anyway.
the ok boomer thing is a d&c psyop
Because western families throw their kids out of the house as soon as they turn 18 and only phone their kids to b***h. Utterly alien concept to other cultures and it's no fricking wonder the poor boomers are despised for their fricking moronic behaviour.
Asian families do not tie their kids to rent until they have enough to own the property. Eastern-Euro families do not tie their kids to rent until they have enough to own the property. Purely a moronic western thing that has damaged age relations almost irreparably.
>Because western families throw their kids out of the house as soon as they turn 18 and only phone their kids to b***h.
I don't know why this dumb meme persists given the sheer number of 30-something millennials who still live at home with their parents in the USA, and the amount that lived at home well into their 20s. That hasn't been relevant since the early 90s. Generally speaking, the kids wanted to move out and gain their own independence as soon as possible, it was part of American culture and had nothing to do with hating your parents or vice versa. Life on your own was a lot more affordable back then and they wanted to enjoy being an adult on their own terms.
Because they want to throw their kids out, fail because there's nowhere for them to go and they spend a decade resenting each other.
Bird leaving the nest culture, very moronic. We aren't birds, Black person.
It simply comes down to the fact that Americans for the longest time valued independence while Europeons have been conditioned by centuries of authoritarian rule to favor a state of dependency. Living in your own house with your own car and doing whatever the frick you want beats living under mommy and daddy's roof well into adulthood, or at least it did when that was actually financially viable, and before America became overrun by brown hordes who voted in authoritarian politicians who promised them endless gibs.
>spoon feed me
i bet you didnt even fricking ask
and if they tried to get you to do shit you didnt want to you got pissy about it so they just gave up.
Just wait till the floodgates are fully opened and 3rd worlders pour into the mainstream western culture. We already have a little sample of what pajeets are capable of with starfield, though they were only used as a tool and didn't have too much creative input. But just imagine what awaits us...
They used to hire people with creative vision and artistic skill. Now they hire people to do a job that they're told.
Yeah partly this
And partly that the increase in things like early access or pre-release feedback from non-developers makes even the ones with talent and spine get forced into design by committee.
AI will actually fix this as one person or a small group will be able to create games alone to their vision without having so much money put into it that they have to appeal to the masses to make a profit.
AI will save gaming.
I rather believe they still hire creative and artistic skilled people. But there are linkedin approved scrum masters, agile processes, project leads, etc. in their way to reduce costs and be "more efficient". It kills not only the video game industry but basically anything involved with software. I'm working in a big software department and for each programmer or artists there are at least 1 project lead, several boards of tickets to work on and of course a scrum master to tell you what to do when. I hope this cancer work system fades as soon as possible. Artists and devs should equaliy build something together without shit tons of people from other fields to tell you what to do.
frick is a scrum
bottom looks better
What's the issue here besides sky looking prettier in the older game
too much unneeded detail
Its overly whimsical. Pretty much a barbie game
>the magical sorcerer steals all dragons from their realms, turning them into statues that a young dragon must go around and save
>over whimsical
Black person come the frick on now
Too busy and noisy
Despite there being more detail from the technical standpoint, the first one is easier to parse what you're looking at from a quick glance
>Jesus frick what is that?
>what could I possible be looking at??
>there’s entirely too much detail for me to determine that I am looking at a castle in a timely fashion
>I guess I’ll never know what it is
Being this moronic
Like with a shitload of remakes, lighting is fricked. See Ocarina of Time 3D or Halo CE Anniversary for other blatant examples.
The lighting in OOT3D is only noticeably worse in the handful of dark areas because they had to compensate for the 3D effect
The mood is gone
No issue at all. Just your average controonian Gankerirgin loser being irrational and thinking that anything that is old even though it looks like shit, makes it look automatically better than anything that came after it.
People who use word loser are not rational.
As they are either mindless fanatics obsessed with idealogical correctness or literal subhumans driven by instincts and reflexes.
Bizzare cope, losercel
One of the problems with remakes is that they tend to overcrowd what is shown. Certain setpieces are intended for promotional screenshots where they'll show just how much they've "improved" with the remake by showing every blade of grass and throwing in so many extra shades of colours that the original colour theory goes out the window.
That last point is always brought up with Spyro in particular because the devs made a rather significant point of it. The skyboxes are always the first thing because of how prominent they are, and everything else naturally follows.
>sky is prettier
not even that's true, as someone not boggled down and moronic from nostalgia like the rest of the thread, the top looks like shit even considering the era and bottom is an improvement but the game regardless of remake or original is still shit.
>your games are shit and obsolete, buy mine
t. israelite
>not boggled down and moronic from nostalgia like the rest of the thread
It's got nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with visual design. Whether the PS1 game looks ugly is irrelevant to the problems.
I think Artisans was the best one to point out considering how much visual noise is added in to the scene and is actually quite disruptive in general when you can't even make out the cave clearly. The Spyro remakes tarnished the artstyle beyond repair.
wrong reply, was supposed to be to you
>Cave is hard to see/find
More like I can't see it at fricking all. The pillars and castle looking like they're taken from the mountains themselves in the original is a huge deal too. Helps the world feel more connected, like of course theyd use the mountains to make their stone, there's a cave right there.
I got called a schizo for pointing out that the drastic deviation in artstyle effectively fricked many of the platforming elements or areas in the levels. Even if you were a diehard, shitposting contrarian or a TFB employee how can you defend mucking up the actual means of finding items or navigating levels?
Modern graphics whoring has ruined all visual clarity yes. To the point games have officially given up and covered everything in yellow paint or give you a partner that tells you exactly what to do every second.
People meme on navi being annoying but I don't remember her ever telling what I could and couldn't jump over.
>Cave is hard to see / find
Complete and utter bullshit that is completely made up from this particular perspective of this pic that you'd never have in the game itself. I played reignited not too long ago and you'll naturally notice the cave the moment you arrive at the top of the round pathway looking for what might be the main way from there and where the "off the beaten path" parts can be found. You'll see the unreachable cave (need speed power up to get there) and the huge cones that are still moving at the time and need to be stabilized.
>cluttered, messy mountains
Like real mountains?
>obsession with idealogical correctness
>accusation of wrongthhink
>anyone who doesn't think like me is moronic
People like you are souless shit, literally meat machines.
I have no nostalgia for Spyro, I didn't own a PS1. The top screen was clearly designed by someone actually trained as an artist, the bottom looks like plastic, generic Fortnite-esque tripe whipped up by some pajeet.
>the top looks like shit
One of the things Spyro is best known and praise for is its skyboxes.
Total zoomer death.
>What's the issue here besides sky looking prettier in the older game
Nothing
Ganker got nostalgia bias again
There is no issue, the OP is a moron as are most posters on Ganker and they should all be sterilized or executed. But none of that is new. The remake actually did ruin a couple levels but Autumn Plains isn't one of them
top:
>dreamy
>surreal
>turns the users imagination into a game engine
bottom:
>intrusive
>cartoonish
>sacrifices imagination for a futile pursuit of realism
also yes the lighting. a good comparison would be this:
vs
je nais se quoi
adding detail doesn't mean they're striving for realism
You make a good point. But what were they going for with all that extra detail? Looks pretty pointless to me.
>it's too cartoony but it's also trying to be realistic
nostalgiabrains, everyone
There's nothing wrong with orchestral tributes, anon. I love OoT's soundtrack, but it can be great to hear what it'd sound like with a real orchestra.
>original
the version on the left isn't the original, it has fricked up lighting and lots of missing world models and vehicle spawns
magical land = everything must be wonky and crooked, how whacky and not like real life!!
looks like utter fricking shite
Bitches don't know about color theory
>duplicate file
See
They changed the grass color 0/10
No sense of art direction. My eye is drawn more to the tree on the left than to Spyro.
It doesn't look like it did 25 years ago.
No. Nostalgia makes you think technical limitations were the developer's soulful vision.
i just think developers working around limitations is more interesting than those who just dump un-optimised assets into their releases because "everyone has 200GB spare space for my game".
one takes skill and thought and makes you appreciate the work behind it more.
it doesn't have to be this way, spyro sure didn't
not everyone is born a teacher, and most abstract ideas are very difficult to explain without knowing the the words
in a medium as new as video games, many of those words don't exist or are too occulted to be even professional knowledge
Gaslighters get the rope.
I will NOT be persuaded into doubting my own perception.
I will NOT be convinced that outsourced scrambled pajeet models with distorted art direction are superior to inhouse creativity and passion fueled by once young lads trying to push the envelope.
I will NOT reject what still holds up because art direction with a vision upholds fancy modern effects.
Frick you.
oh boy here comes the corpo left to tell us all we don't remember the games we currently own and can experience at any time properly
the shining happened and everyone thought remakes and adapatations would be better if they differed from the source material
I think so, yes. The publishers pushed their talent too hard and made them leave in droves so they got replaced with fresh-out-of-college graduates. The ones with actual talent leave once they realize the bullshit they have to put up with, and the insane ones with no skill or even passion stay around to produce bland, samey games.
Graphical limitations in the past meant devs had to use different methods to portray something
Plus the fact it was harder to hide parts done like shit (for the time)
i dunno why toys for bob gets so much praise. their games look *fine*, i hate their character designs but the environments are meh. very hit and miss, particularly in the spyro remakes
i still dont understand why activision would abolish vicarious visions, a developer that made two well-beloved and well-received remaster that sold millions, while keeping toys for bob around, the devs so talented they ruined crash's reputation twice in a row
>vicarious visions
I can still see and hear the splash screen 25 years later
If you showed the bottom picture of the remake to (You)rself in 1999, your past self would piss his pants over how amazing it looks
Reality is that it looks fricking good, you're just stuck in nostalgia
t. bigger Spyro fan than you will ever be, still like the remakes
As a guy who only played the Sypro game on a ps 1 demo disc, should I play original Spyro games or remakes?
I'm not gonna do both since my backlog is too big
Just play the originals. Its not like the Crash remakes where they added some good features, all they did was ruin the visuals
>Reality is that it looks fricking good, you're just stuck in nostalgia
Nope, I didn't even play Spyro much as a kid and I still think it's too cluttered. T4B have a big issue with making their games look too busy, particularly in Crash 4 where there are five hundred crates in each level, some of which you miss because they get obstructed by or blend in with the background. The fact that game needs a drop shadow outline says it all really.
>like the remakes
slopper detected
My past self couldn't see what fits together and what is not, as my past self was inexperienced. People have a tendency to fine-tune their sense of style, harmony and integrity, especially if they constantly interact with various arts and styles, preferably not absent-mindedly.
Yet, if your only source of culture was latest AAA YOBA games, you tend to keep your evaluation of what you see based on the amount of details only without percepting mismatches.
I guess, you consider Legendary edition of Mass Effect the pinnacle of visuals.
Kids are easily wowed. The fact that you're still wowed by superficiality instead of finesse is proof that your brain is underdeveloped.
The appreciation for something like psx graphics and style comes with age.
There's another explanation: that you're a goddamn zoomie. In which case, there’s not much else to say.
Perfect explanation. That's all.
Of course the bottom picture looks better, you moron. The point is that back then people could utilize better the limited technology they had.
I would say it looks more detailed but theres a complete lack of artistic flare or interpretation. If you want something comparable, think of all the shitty Hannah Barbera cartoons that kept popping up endlessly or 80's action ones. They all looked the same, had the same plots or stiff animations, the same bad voice-acting and so on.
Actually no I had this exact internal discussion with myself way back when. I was reading some gaming magazine in a store while the rest of my family shopped and I remember seeing those shitty mockups of some "hyper-realistic" video game of the future and I knew then and there I never wanted games where every single object on the screen is overly shined and polished bullshit with a bazillion details spread around taking away your attention from the actual fricking game. Anybody who actually takes games seriously never wanted this. The time they'd take to make it look like that means it went away from the actually important parts of development: the game
More details your brain doesn't have time to register doesn't make the visuals better, even if it looks more realistic. Rendering every leaf and grass polygon doesn't add much to the bigger picture.
Ok, now scale down the bottom one to the same resolution and aspect ratio as the top one. Or scale up the top one. Either way top wins.
Yes.
But there are a few who have risen up above the sea of slop indie cargo cult devs.
And there will be more.
It's not just an issue of talent, but also a matter of taste. There's been a huge collapse in people's tastes on average in the last twenty years.
Only the most profoundly stupid homosexual who grew up watching 21st century 3d animated shlock would think bottom looks good.
reddit morality, deviantart, and furry porn has nuked a lot of potential devs brains. also the nerd demographic has become much more liberal compared to the late 90s which lowered artistic standards and gatekeeping. slop humans can only create slop
Yes.
Silly question.
Why even ask that?
death stranding is proof you need to be talented to make bad video games
kojima did that game with sticks and stones and it still turned out good
The remake had a fundamental misunderstanding of the art direction.
we'll never gonna get games to look like the prerendered adverts are we?
I'll never get tired of that article.
Yes, back in the day, it was mostly white men making games. Now, you have chinks, Black folk, poos, browns, mongrels, women.
The only ones making good videogames were the Japanese, still are. Whitoids never understood the medium and are on their way to destroy it.
You will never be a Japanese.
>jews and normalgays never understood the medium and are on their way to destroy it.
Fixed you
Yes, because they had to work with hardware limitations and engineer smart and technical optimization to make their games run.
>neither remake has white pants
fricking GARBAGE
Definitely. I hate contemporary AAA graphics. There is great attention to detail, but you cannot interact with any of it.
They worked with less and tried to make it more. The remakes are butthurt developers salty that they have to remake something so they try and add in their own visuals/ values. The art is wrong in the Spyro remakes. The lighting fricking sucks and doesn't capture that twilight dusk of levels the use of colors are so off it's upsetting to people who enjoy art understand the importance of protecting original visions.Those hacks used modern lighting and over exposed everything, but it's 30000000 polys now so everything is crisp and clean. Frick them.
Modern developers couldn’t make above work on anything below PS4 hardware.
Genuinely, yes. Look at the fricking state of so many games on release these days, too many of them can't even launch as fully functional products.
In thinking about your posted image, I'd still say yes, the old necessity to "do more with less" shows a higher level of skill and creativity.
I don't get it, some of you are upset that... Developers don't need to go through extra bullshit to make a good looking game??
The remake looks fantastic baring questionable character designs (i.e Spike's new look) but otherwise, the levels, homeworlds, and music (75% of it) is great.
>The remake looks fantastic
nope
Less is more anon
>Developers don't need to go through extra bullshit to make a good looking game?
limitations breed creativity, anon
I understand that, but reignited wasn't an original creation. They were working off of what the old devs had already made. They took creative liberties with some redesigns, some I don't like, others I do, but really what else were they supposed to get creative with? What limitations did they need to surpass?
I wanna hear legitimate grievances people have with reignited because genuinely I'd rather have it than not, I can go back and play the old trilogy any time, reignited is as if I were living through my childlike imagination.
I dislike its overall warmer colour palette but that's because i prefer cooler colours. The deep megentas and purples of the old look added to the dream like look it had.
I last ran through reignited in 2018 so I don't remember the specifics on the colors and hues, but the level layouts and remastered models. Still that's a fair assessment.
Elora and Bianca are the only standout "improvements" to me personally.
Because they went really try hard on "humanoid" faces for npcs and enemies that REALLY did not need it. Like
Like I said, reignited is fantastic to me just because it's more Spyro in a familiar environment, but it's obviously not perfect. I just also think it's not fair to say that it's BAD.
>magic crafters
>we overwatch now
>games from same era look samey
No shit.
TRAVELING TO HIGH CAVES
PREPARE YOUR DEFENSES
SELECT YOUR HERO
no taste homosexual
>Elora and Bianca are the only standout "improvements" to me personally.
I loved what they did with Ripto and his henchmen. Ripto especially looks more reptilian and being slimmed down adds more to his napoleon complex. Overall, the three are improved over the originals, Gnasty is an inoffensive 1:1 recreation of the original but touched up in HD, and the Sorceress was botched completely.
having replayed spyro 2 just a week ago that image is physically repulsive
They look like Fanboy and Chum-Chum characters.
Reignited is like playing the game with other's imagination rather than your own. This is why movie adaptations never work either. There is a lot to lose between translation and interpretation.
There is not a single redesign I enjoy from reignited, except for those that translate the designs faithfully and little else which are few and far between. Same goes for color palettes, the entire game is tinted in weird hues because they can't have creative colors due to using realtime lighting.
There is nothing good about this version for me. It is obviously a good game because it's built on the backbone of three excellent games but it captured none of the magic.
I'm annoyed with remakes existing at all. Trying to build on top of an already existing work that has nothing wrong with it, rather than attempting to create something as good from scratch, is lazy from the start. I don't think a thing deserves praise for the most notable part of it being needless overcomplication.
Would you really trust that a complete original Spyro game in this age would live up to the old trilogy? I don't.
Spyro has been rebranded so much it almost feels deliberate. They tried to make him a serious chosen one Frodo/analogue and it didn't work. They tried to make him overly silly and ugly for a literal toddler's toy commercial and that lasted a few years. Then the remakes happened and TFB ruined Crash and got sent to the COD mines like VV and Beenox. Really at this point Activision should just sell the IP.
Are you dumb? Crash remake was good.
Crash 2 was butchered beyond repair
Spyro remake was good. Crash remake less so. No neutral slide spin.
The Crash remake fricked up not only the art style but the hitbox
For the most part, but rounded edges in a platformer was moronic. Road to Nowhere went from being a decent yet precarious level to the hardest in the game. 1 and 2 shouldn't have had relics either.
The only thing I liked was time trials for 1-2 even if some of them were annoying as sin.
>frick up the physics and hitboxes in a platformer
>don't fix all the significant problems the original trilogy had
No.
>give Crash 1 a save system like 2 and 3
>give it an autosave slot so you can't even save 4 files like the originals
The only actual improvement they gave 1 is still inferior to the version in the originals. Incredible.
I agree with you on that, but I believe if they can't produce a quality game then the series deserves to die rather than being propped up with nostalgia bait.
From a gameplay standpoint, they unlocked the framerate but your jump is shit above 30, I beat the entire first game at about 144fps and I had no idea why the game was so fricking annoying with the jumps.
Graphically, it doesn't invoke the old feel of Spyro games. Environments are too busy, trees and basic structures now all look like they came out of fricking Tangled. It's very wannabe Pixar, characters look weird, the dragons I saved looked like deviant art shit. It's so fricking bizarre because Spyro himself looks amazing but every other character is such a departure or downgrade.
Finally the voice acting is worse, it doesn't feel like whoever did the direction understood the original.
this is why books are the lowest form of art; you can do anything
The remakes were outsourced to third-worlders and every level and character looks like something out of Planet Sheen.
>the levels, homeworlds
See the article posted earlier about color theory and Spyro. The levels and homeworlds don't look good or even close to correct in a lot of scenarios. A lot of it is outright just careless if you actually paid attention to what you were playing. It's not just character design they got wrong.
Pressure creates diamonds.
>Pressure creates diamonds.
I like that. I'll probably steal it
Its a super old quote so go for it.
The right could work for a movie aimed at 3 year olds.
Chinese ones yes. Asians for some reason love to feed their kids the most soulless slop.
>turn a lake at sunset into lethal lava land
wtf
I'm looking between these images and I can't stand the saturation of color with the remake. It's so jarring. The colors are like, fantasy baby blue but they're also so fricking strong.
Games still do this today though.
Because the engine does it for them. Rare's culling approach at the time was self programmed and why they were able to push the N64s graphic fidelity further than their competitors.
I miss when games played with vertex coloring like this. It's amazing
Going on noclip (dot) website and just turning the vertex colors on/off on scenes shows how much work vcolors put in back in the day. I don't know of many people who did them dynamically on the level of Rare however, most games just baked them in.
Tomb raider does it for underwater sections too
Oh yeah, I always thought it was textures for some reason like how OOT does it.
I really wonder if they had some sort of tool that helped them do it, because hand painting every vertex animation like that seems like it would takes weeks. The banjo one is particularly crazy because it changes colors and shades, not just one or the other.
every in house engine has self programmed frustum culling.
Yes, but youre an idiot if you think rando third party devs had culling as efficient as what Rare had. It wasn't some magic coincidence Rare games look better than shit like blues brothers.
Your ability to optimize the tech was as important as your artistic skills at the time.
>the remake looks fantastic
no it doesn't, it suffers from visual clutter, ugly redesigns and shitty blizzard-tier overwatch shading.
Other than Spyro, that simply has uninspired artistic vision, the vidya industry simply suffers from being a high effort job paid like shit, with horrible working hours.
If you're a smart person with good software engineering skills, you get into fintech, cybersecurity, banking, insurance etc. for great working hours, benefits and higher salary.
If you want to develop games, you can do it on the side as an indie, there's no fricking plus to working in a big software house.
No, there was just as much shovelware back in the day.
And that shovelware was of higher quality than most games today
Yes, but mostly because the studios refuse to hire more talented people because they cost more and demand better conditions. There are still talented people, but they go into other industries because AAA video game studios are abusive as hell.
everyone from the past will be more talented until the collapse
Crash remakes > Spyro remakes
Vicarious Visions did a better job at it than Toys for Bob. Sure there were a few hiccups or very small loss of things in some sections of the game which people still complain about, but overall it felt much more faithful towards the spirit of Crash in my opinion.
Spyro remakes fricked the visuals, Crash remakes fricked the gameplay. I suppose it's up to personal taste which is worse.
>Crash remakes fricked the gameplay.
Have you played in a while? there were some issues that patched over time.
I get it now, yeah they made some bad decisions
>yeah they made some bad decisions
I just want to demonstrate to you that I'm not cherry picking by showing another example. These were all very intentional visual design decisions with Insomniac. Whoever made this remake was not paying attention to any of the original art design documents. They likely never even consulted anyone who worked with the studio.
that happens with almost all remakes sadly, we want to be better and different than those before and we are fed by those that would called us names if we just copy pasted the same stuff with improved graphics.
its sad but its the same thing with book adaptations being unfaithful.
>graphic limitations made them look that way, >this that I'm doing now is what they really intended and what they would've done having today's resources
its basically modern hubris
>graphical limitations made them that way
Exactly, so that's how they planned the presentation on. You'll still never be able to explain the lack of pink in Magic Crafters, unless you want to die on the hill that the remakes had proper art direction. They didn't.
>bro this is what Oddworld was supposed to look like the entire time if graphics were better
I'm still angry.
Not the case here since you clearly do because you posted it anon, but I refuse to engage in conversation with anyone that doesn’t understand this image. Talking with dumb people makes my brain hurt
Couldn't you have bit crunched the left image a bit more? I can still make out some of the shapes
What's crazy is how much they change colors needlessly. For example, look at the green on the buildings, it's blue now for no reason. Why did they decide to do different colors is a big question. Lighting, stuff like the ground it sucks but I can kind of understand it but why do they always always always change the color of the man-made structures?
Because REALISM
They are both equally realistic anon don't frick with me!!!
Right is more professional. It was intended.
lmaaaooo
Most of these complaints are nonsensical, but this one is just plain wrong. Oversaturated color is the work of an amateur, which Insomniac Games was when working on Spyro, their first game. Inb4 some homosexual tries to claim it's a cartoony style. Frick you. Learn some basic color theory.
>shit looks like an overwatch map
kek, that's 100% on the money
>that fricking sunset castle
i dont know how they made such a warm, inviting environment look like a hell world but they did it. holy shit toys for bob, end yourselves.
> warm, inviting environment
Black person it's a boss level, it's not meant to be warm or inviting
Id only argue that the in the first map could very easily be an afternoon skybox. the pink colors arent fantasy per se, some afternoon evening skies have those colors.
These are good examples that there was nothing that needed to be remade in the originals.
>I believe them
Made me chuckle
>complaining about the door on the castle
How do they leave the castle to go to what is clearly the attached courtyard then? Just hop through a window?
If you have 30 minutes to spare, this is a really interesting interview that shows the wizardry of mid 90s developers
>wizardry
computer shit really is magic
especially audio
People act like I'm irrational for liking the original more, the games from this studio had their own art direction which Bluepoint ignored, I've seen the "if they had the technology then it would have looked like the remake" but that's not true, it'd look like The Last Guardian
How do I know this image isn't the typical cherry picking?
Oh no it isn't at all, it's very well known that Wander has a very stiff and inexpressive face in the remake, meanwhile he does move his eyes around in the original, which is easy to miss thanks to the game's low resolution in original hardware, he's got a very wax like appearance, the game is also at times too green and lively, it's supposed to be a dead, empty and desolate land
So play it on PS2? PS3?
original is obviously artistically superior and it isn't rose tinted glasses because i stopped playing the game after the third collosi when i rented it when it came out. i don't like the gameplay at all.
Because back then they had limited graphics/textures and had to rely on artstyle/artistic vission, a skill that have being lost along being able to reduce the size of games.
Yes, next question.
every remake/remaster needs the option to also play with the old graphics, there are no excuses to not put it in the game
I think the remake devs did the best they could, but you simply cannot achieve the same mysterious, dreamy feeling that the originals had with modern graphics. They pushed the bounds of the PS1 and used a dozen little tricks that let your mind fill in the details when you couldn't have more than a few polygons per object, but with the ability to put more detail per square inch into a game these days, your mind no longer needs to guess and imagine the missing details, so the magic of the originals was lost from day 1.
What was the last game that came out that actually had a distinct, iconic artstyle? Cuphead? It feels like we haven’t had a game that actually created something new on the levels of older games, even now people still talk about the visuals of Crash and Spyro despite being 25+ year old games.
Pizza tower is already getting visuals clones.
imagine cloning a clone
never played spyro but top looks more comfy for me. Yet I bet new generations will eat UE slop any day.
It's not just the visuals. I tried the remake, and I couldn't get into it. Something with the camera, maybe the zoom level or FoV, kept throwing me off. It feels worse to play, and I struggle to put my finger on exactly why
Also, the gems in the original were perfection
Getting to this room at the end of the game was so incredibly satisfying.
My mouth is watering at how hard I wanna collect those gems..
>gems in the original were perfection
And they removed the gems collected animation at the end of every level while traveling back to the hub world. Sure it's only a small detail, but it's all the little things that actually start piling up when you get this many things wrong in the first place. This could be forgivable if the presentation on everything wasn't so off.
There it is again! Why did they change the Gem in the UI to orange? So many pointless color changes in these remakes.
>Sure it's only a small detail
Small details make the game. They're frequently the difference between a good version and a bad version of the same concept or genre, or, like in this case, of the same game
Didn’t they get rid of the long distance glimmer on gems in the remake too?
This reminds me that I was pissed that in 2 they removed things like 1-up chests and redesigned chests and gems to the point of removing blue gems in favor of a more indigo-ish tone.
They had the life-butterfly jars so they didn’t really remove them. I like both designs personally.
I’m not sure where I stand on the 1-up mechanics (get lives from killing enemies you’ve already encountered vs. farming sheep). I think I prefer Spyro 1, in terms of it having actual risk/reward. But I can understand how 2 is better for kids, and preferable for that reason. Interesting to consider how both in cases, if you are good at the game, you mainly get lives from the chests/jars.
Yes. Most devs back in the day were seasoned programmers and had to learn the technology they were given. There was no google or stack overflow in 1994. Either you knew what you were doing or you had to look through a 2000 page manual to find it.
a lot of sprite-based games were made without functioning level editors at all
Modern devs feel like that quote from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park at times. So much random bullshit and noise added in just for the sake of it.
Most AAA studios now a days have 200+ people working on a game. How can you have a single creative vision like that?
Well what do you think if they were able to put awesome games on 700mb cds and had very few pre-made assets in their possession except maybe some basic soundpacks? I also recall that games like Spyro or Crash were supposed to be nearly impossible to run on PS1 but turns out they weren't.
I'm not even one to cherry pick remakes endlessly, but with Spyro's case the technical limitations were quite literally the intentional art design of the game. They had to come up with creative solutions to the problems with visual design at that time. There's plenty of games out there of where you can't say the same or where the developers have clearly communicated as to why it was done, in many cases it could be seen as ambiguous at best.
More talanted? Dunno
More creative? Definitely
Yep. They had to think of solutions for problems where "Buy better hardware" wasn't an option.
RAM not fast enough to load the whole instance? Restart the console everytime.
Not even diskspace on Memory Card in the day? Rely of passcodes that player input to return to stages in the game.
Limited space on a cd disc? Make two cd's and have the player input the other one when they get to that stage.
Need to add a wow factor that impresses gamers? Don't hire more asset creation and celebrity actors. Make the player use the 2nd controller slot on the console as an actual game mechanic.
i've heard stories modern game engines like the latest unreal thing basically does a lot of work for you. i'm ignorant on such things ultimately though. but i'm inclined to believe it because video games fricking suck now.
Back then, devs had to pretty much create everything from scratch. For this, they needed to do more work and understand how the systems worked. What they then made (engine, tools, art, etc...), was fine tuned for their game and vision. During this process, they gained a lot of valuable experience, created a strong team because teamwork was absolutely nessecary, and knowledge.
Compare that to now where everything is available to you online. You don't need to create anything. The systems are all there.
Engine? Just use unreal or unity.
Art?
Just buy it online and tweak it or hire someone on the other side of the world to do it for you. Someone who only cares about getting paid, aren't part of the dev team per se, and has no understanding or caring of what their art is really for.
Modern devs essentially put together something from other people's work.
This way, devs get no experience, no understanding of how the engine and the systems work, and they don't create a strong team because they don't need to.
Then there are the over reliance on 3D tools. Sure they are great, but again you won't understand the underlying systems if you just drag shit across the screen and put in some numbers into a pre made text box.
It's not all about the technical limitations, they didn't even care.
We contrast postan?
bottom looks better
Zoomers aren't allowed to comment on threads about visuals.
While I will give you that early Blizzard 3D-style was kind of messy with its many small shifts in contrast, I still don't agree.
Blizzard makes ugly games in general, but the remaster is the lesser of two evils in this case.
>way too much contrast
>every color competes to be the most vivid and intense
>no real unifying visual theme
Starcraft II and WoW are unironically their best-looking games. Not saying much though.
>tries to look more real
>ends up looking like a cartoon
What's so hard to understand?
Ummmmm no sweaty
>Background is low contrast
Ok? Hows it look with actual units tho? you know, the stuff that actually needs to pop out?
>completely different genre
Frick off
This. Why did game developers stop doing contrasts when designing visuals?
Drives me up the fricking wall when some dumb c**t says it's harder to make games than it ever has been. I could throw together a game about a black dude throwing flaming fried chicken at police in less than a weekend with 4 levels, music, sound, and a leaderboard, just by firing up unreal and dropping in a bunch of bullshit. They're pretending they do soooo much work to shovel out another annual helping of "snarky young adventurer saves the world and preaches kindness while collecting bullshit" 2, when the only reason that feels like work is that it's the only thing more tedious than playing their shitty games.
I think this is the only skybox that managed to be even somewhat sort of remotely correct compared to the others, yet it still lacks the contrast of many other shades in the scene. Really just even changing those clouds to orange would be enough to push it further.
>25th Anniversary was 26 days ago
>all we got was a picture from Toys For Bob
Spyro is dead, but maybe its for the best.
Reddit said there's a 4 between Y and R.
Holy fricking shit that is some galaxy-ending power-level copium.
Two more weeks.
Something people need to understand is all the people who made games like spyro good left ages ago. The current holders of any given IP like this aren't the same people who made the games you like. Blizzard is another example.
Spyros been dead for ages it didnt take a pajeet remake for me to realize that.
Obviously they would fail at making a new spyro game, so what else is left? Would actually anyone be excited for reignited of the PS2 games? I doubt.
Imagine thinking the top looks better. This board is schizo
>Imagine thinking the top looks better
If we're judging what the level looks like outside the hardware that it's running on, yes. I do think the original looks better.
Bluepoint got two remakes/remasters right...
Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and the new Demon's Souls.
Thats it.
>Days since Ganker seethed about TfB: 0
Old dragon appears as dark purple.
New dargon appears as magenta and pink.
Somehow, people are okay with this and don't see a problem.
remakes are inherently creatively bankrupt. If bottom was a new ip I'd be all over it bus as is meh
Yes. Pic unrelated?
Go read up what developers had to do to get the top working. Cache and memory were limited on the PS1 so they basically had to micromanage streaming chunks of of the levels. Absolute wizards.
Soul.
Took me a moment to recognize this was midday gardens lol
Why would all the colour get all fricked with a glitch like that?
Not necessarily, that’s true. But I do think the way they handle the environment looks dull because it looks more realistic. Eg. The colours of the rocks, mountains, sky and lights… Another example is the the smoggy distance fog they add seemingly at random to some levels.
It's Spyro 3.5.
Ahh, thanks. Do you use a ps1 emulator to play it? Or is it a standalone?
Yes you use an emulator after patching spyro 1.0 with it but the mod is not for everyone xD It has new textures, skyboxes and music, but the gameplay itself includes speedrunning tricks and exploits. I almost gave up the whole thing before I got 10 eggs but I ended up playing until I got 80 eggs to see the credits.
Neat. I’ll give a try.
>speedrunning tricks
Lol I only know the double jump in Spyro 2 and a few wallgliding glitches in spyro 1. How fricked am I?
You will use save states and you will look up on youtube how to proceed but you will make it... I played the green spyro one which is the actual challenge, there's apparently a red spyro tourist version available which I guess let's you find the level completion portal guy easier, but I don't recommend.
These games look like dogshit now and when they came out
Like holy crap that is hideous. No wonder these games died by the time PS2 came out.
Literally banjo kazooie looks better.
>sony thing bad
>nintendo thing good
classic Ganker moment
That is not from the original game tho, regards:
>yay we beat the evil guys in ww2
>everything goes to shit right afterwards
i refuse to believe that the correct people won ww2
Things didn't get bad until around the turn of the millennia, after the hyper capitalism of the late 80s finally started showing its long term side effects.
you're thinking of pop culture
i'm thinking of social issues
Same deal
Nah. The lead artists who did the concept drawings for the Spyro remake are legitimately really talented, and have artstyles that would have done really well for a remake. The remakes were shit because they were incredibly low-budget and all the finalized 3D modeling work was outsourced to an indian sweatshop that couldn't get the really nice, soft gradients that a lot of the concept art had. There was also a lot of management frickery; the guy who designed the ugly remake Gnorcs, for example, also drew concept art of them looking far more in-line with the originals, but had to make the more grotesque design instead at management's direction.
Nobody sets out to make a shit game. Management sets out to maximize profit margins. These things are usually at odds with eachother, especially since in the western game industry that means nobody stays at one job long enough to get any in-depth experience; one of the lead animators on Jak 1-3 had to work on some Puzzle Bobble VR shovelware title recently, for example, because nobody else is hiring cartoony 3D modelers and animators. It's all outsourced now.
I’ve never played the original Spyro trilogy
Should I play the ps1 games in 4K on Duckstation or pirate the remake?
Actually I just checked and apparently I already own the game on Steam
Always go for the originals, the music is awesome and it's filled to the brim with SOVL.
definitely the emulator. i never owned a ps1 as a kid and am really impressed with spyro 1-3 after trying them as an adult. beautiful games with as much of a special feel as OoT. It's worth it man.
Play the originals. The remakes aren't bad, but they're worse. Par for the course, really, and it's a shame because the remakes could really have been good if they didn't outsource almost all of the 3D work.
Not familiar with this character but it seems they want me to want to have sex with her in this version
Unfortunately, her actual 3D model looks like shit in the remake.
Wow yeah I take back what I said
Yeah, that's par for the course with just about every model in the remake. Even the ones that weren't outsourced to Indian sweatshops were given to random contractors without much direct oversight, so they look "off compared to the concept" at best and completely shit at worst. Even the better ones miss out on the really lovely soft gradients that define the look of both Devon Cady-Lee and Nicholas Kole's designs, so they all look like weirdly chunky fortnite models. It's a shame.
Feels like they were going for a design that they hoped would inspire lots of deviant art porn of, but they forgot to make them look appealing to begin with
I don't really agree. The concept art genuinely looks really appealing, and I say this as someone with no desire to frick any of the characters.
Notably, Devon Cady-Ler also worked on Gigantic, a (now dead) multiplayer game that I actually think did the Spyro 1-3 artstyle WAY better. A lot of the maps had this really cool painterly look to them and the character models were all done in-house so they got his designs far closer to the concepts.
Here's a screenshot as an example. The maps in Gigantic were directed by Lisa Fleck, the same chick who did the environment art for Slime Rancher. I wish they'd gotten her for the Spyro remakes because god damn the softer, less chunky details just work so much better.
Go with original ps1.
I just played them all on duckstation myself. Had a blast.
I plan to emulate them, more respectful to the original creators vision IMO.
Always play the original versions of a game before any remakes.
Maybe not always, but I personally cannot think of a counterexample.
the only fanbase on this website that I've ever seen shill for remakes is the pokemon fanbase, but they've been conditioned for most of their life to be consoomers
I loved it back when devs had to work around the limitations of current hardware rather than what we have now. Optimization was king back then. There are few cases like that today.
people were hired for expertise and passion
people are now hired for diversity and cults
people used to push their tools to the max and then find ways to go beyond the intended use
people now use premade shit to throw things together
Unironically what remakes do you gays actually like
Yes. You actually had to have programming skills and a brain
>making shit fit into memory (a few KBs)
>when memory was tight, you had to resort workarounds like lookup tables
>limited CPU budget meant you had to make every cycle count
>you couldn't just load 20MB texture files from a 3D scanner to make a game look good
>art direction was important. you couldn't just slap ugly bloom and filters on everything
>games were made by the same people who played them
games are harder to make now
look at this screenshot for example. a modern game can't have trees that are literally just rectangles with a sphere on top
>a modern game can't have trees that are literally just rectangles with a sphere on top
Not unless you’re an indiedevchad such as myself.
>games are harder to make now
They're not harder to make; they have bloated scopes.
Competency crisis, the west, especially America, started caring less about standardized test scores and merit. Now you get people in positions who got there on a handicap because theyre of some minority group of race or sexual identity due to the civil rights movement and affirmative action at both educational institutions and their employment. Explaining the competency crisis goes smoothly and everyone agrees untill that last sentence, as its a hard pill to swallow.
Funny how this started specifically because minorities kept scoring low on standardized tests no matter how much money and effort was spent uplifting them and regardless of socioeconomic background. Rather than just admit the obvious, they had to drag everyone else down because leftism is essentially a religion.
No, this all started because programs stopped focusing on helping people and started prioritizing equality of outcome (i.e. communism: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need).
Of course it will never work because it all comes down to people staying honest, which there's no real incentive to do (see prisoner's dilemma, principal-agent problem).
Like I said, its a hard pill to swallow. Some people would rather let their lives degrade than concede a fundamental part of their ego. Alot of people. Its why its important to choose your battles and not get overly invested in something you know little about.
>Competency crisis
Stop with this buzzword. Competent people still exist. The problem is competent people have been pushed aside to make room for diversity hires.
>standardized test scores
Cancer. You can't measure intelligence via test scores. All you get are people who're skilled at passing tests.
>the civil rights movement
Oh no, people are abusing something? better repeal it instead of fixing it! btw kys.
>affirmative action
This never made sense. It's just racism but against people who're accused of being racist.
Black person
Wow, solid rebuttal there, champ. You're stupider than a blind ape.
>You can't measure intelligence via test scores. All you get are people who're skilled at passing tests.
This is room temperature IQ cope. You're brown and am*rican.
>defending education as signaling
morons like you who outsource employee training to college are the reason why even mopping the floor requires a BSc nowadays.
By all means continue to deflect blame as your shithole zogbot nation slides into third-world status.
>no rebuttal
Alrighty then, keep seething impotently with your funny internet pictures while the adults talk.
>americans
>adults
Good one.
>You can't measure intelligence via test scores
Lol. Yes you can.
All a college degere does is prove that you were diligent enough to withstand 4 years of grueling desk work. It doesn't prove that you're the next Einstein or Stephen Hawking.
Why are you suddenly sperging about degrees now, moron? Are you asshurt you don't have one?
You can measure intelligence with a test. It's called an IQ test. Additionally, the SAT and the military ASVAB are both effectively IQ tests.
IQ tests are racist and don't account for emotional intelligence
Thats correct but its not a rebuttal.
Yes it is. There are a myriad of jobs paywalled behind a college degree that don't actually require the skills it certifies. All because boomers are too lazy to actually screen employees.
SAT is a joke. It's a function of base intelligence + the time you spend preparing for it. So a median IQ midwit with grit could spend months preparing and outperform a high IQ who didn't prepare at all. That being said the high IQ could prepare in much less time and score higher, but more than likely the high IQ is interested in other things that are more stimulating. It's harder for them to stay interested in rote tasks.
>outlier disproves the rule
Lol nope.
I never said it's not useful for filtering everyone within the 1st stdev
>You can't measure intelligence via test scores.
Yes you can. SAT is funny enough correlates quite strongly to iq, but its not meant as a measure of intelligence its a measure of if you learned anything.
Standardized tests need to exist to make sure people meet the standards for a particular job. They don't tell you much about somebody's potential for growth, people skills, etc, and those are important too. There needs to be a human aspect to evaluation.
t. teacher
>t. coping libtard
I want to live in a society where a talented veteran chooses apprentices from a pool of qualified candidates, using a shared cultural background to evaluate their potential as human beings, like his boss did for him.
You want to live in a world where only Asians can get ahead because their parents brainhacked them for rote memorization from a young age. They have always been better at that because it's hard-baked into their culture. But those cultures didn't produce the airplane, the TV, the ticking clock... Westerners did that with the work culture I just described.
In a historical scale I am the conservative and you the progressive on this issue.
I'm a white nationalist. Why don't you say what you really mean instead of libtard gobbly asiatic. You want an all white workforce because they're the master race.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/
good read
The solution is simple: get rid of the shitters.
>meritocracy
It's a meme. It only results in morons chasing after high scores, glory hounds, resume padders, bean counters, etc.
Hell, the reason video games are shit nowadays is precisely because of ~~*metrics-driven*~~ development. Goodhart's Law illustrates this perfectly.
The other big reason is sales targets and "number must go up" every quarter.
Sometimes, yeah, when metrics become a target its a matter of time before it becomes increasingly game'd by people, some metrics are easier to exploit by design and can delay both the severity of their inevitable exploitation and delay the invention of said exploits. Id say it doesent discredit the existence of metrkcs being useful. Just that they arent permanently monolithic.
Keep chasing after those ~~*KPIs*~~, I'm sure your boss will pat you on the back for making the line go higher on the powerpoint presentation to convince suckers to invest in the next pozfest that will "take the gaming world by storm."
A tool can't fix shitty people.
The real difference is that most companies back then were privately owned. Public ownership and acquisitions are what kills creativity.
I don't normally doompost, but yes. Working within a narrow limit really does breed creativity. With inflated budgets and gigantic work teams, modern devs can basically just afford to do everything with no regards to actual creative work.
And indies are no better. 99% of them just chase whatever is trending, hence the glut of scary-world-small-child games, walking sims, and open-world, survival, horror crafting games. And the ones who aren't chasing these genres are instead making games that intentionally look like shit while rubbing one out to their "retro aesthetic" while forgetting that retro games actually had fricking effort put into them, not just three rectangles that you call a sprite.
>top: calm, serene, fairy tail vibe
>bottom: autistic, artificial, hire this man nintendo vibe
Look at the color balance in the top one.
>Were developers from the past more talented
this is my uninformed opinion but wasn't it just a select few talented programmers carrying the space back in the day? we still have talented indie devs around here and there. I wish more devs from the past came out of their cave to develop new games but that didn't work out the past few times it happened.
Not really, but I get why it would look that way.
Games in the past, even AAA games, needed like a dozen people or less to make. However in these cases all 12 people were extremely skilled and knowledge, since you had to be.
You would struggle to find even 12 new people at a modern studio with the talent of these older groups, despite team sizes being in the 100s now.
>all of the men in this picture are now dead
hold me bros...
To all the zoomers obsessed with shitting on anything new: spyro never looked good. Not at release on psx and not now.
compared to N64 slop spyro was pixar movie
>compared to N64 slop spyro was pixar movie
Mario 64 had much better looking characters/enemies than this and it was Nintendo's first attempt at modeling 3D characters
lmao
Unironically a lot better than the weird low-poly things that litter the Spyro games because the PS1 had shit specs
>the PS1 had shit specs
And yet every good looking game from the generation is PS1-only or looks like shit on the N64
here's your draw distance, bro
looks like shit on N64
The filtering was in-engine and literally considered a feature, for some reason.
Looked fine on CRT tube tvs, I guess.
N64's in-engine texture filtering has aged... very badly, but it didn't need to rip out entire chunks of polygon rendering just to get the minimum amount of CPU to render models, with such wasteful allocation that the best games infamously hacked the PS1 itself to get the minimum specs they needed.
Draw distance is a little easier when your hardware texture res is hard-capped to 64x64
The PS1 can't even render textures properly in the first place, it wasn't powerful enough.
a total non issue on duckstation, in fact emulated psx games look at least one whole generation better than emulated N64 games.
bro you have to zoom in 300% to make it look ugly. that mario level is outright disgusting and I didn't even have to cherry pick.
yes of course. it used to be that nerds made video games, now half the frickwads who would have gone for a medical degree for the money go into software dev instead. no passion
Before devs was mostly with high education and 110+ IQ.
Now they're just like me, people who failed to finish college and have schizophrenia.
>5 years later
>Ganker is still "old good, new bad" seething over Reignited
>and suddenly everyone is an art major babbling on about MUH COLOR THEORY
you know your game is good when the only nitpicks Ganker can find are "uhhh muh soul"
not only do we have plenty of art aficionados, visit any rpg thread and you'll find that this site is full of professional novelists as well
thank god you arrived, I really felt like having some curry
>you know your game is good when
your game is hot garbage if you remake the exact same game with questionable improvements.
They sell those games for up to 100% full price.
You could remake something like a Crash Bash by adding an online mode and upscale the graphics and that's all you have to do. You sell this for $20 dollar and cut even after 5000 copies
>remake a game
>few changes
>REEE IT'S A PORT FOR $60
>lots of changes
>REEE RUINED RUINED RUINED
you can't win with Ganker
Bottom looks better lol
Contrarian opinion.
Everything looks the fricking same now.
Yeah, having shit like hyper realistic water in this game made it obvious they just imported some unreal assets and called it a day.
Is the top supposed to look better to you?
yes and its easy to prove
developers then
>understand the hardware and system they are working on to a high degree
>usually serve multi functions
>involved in the design process
>need to figure themselves how to implement certain stuff
>full control of the engine and able to make adjustments on every abstraction layer
developers now
>only understand an abstract level of the tools they are working with
>work on a single secluded thing
>often just a cog in the machine of the creation process
>implement stuff by best practice, google solutions and use pre-made assets and functions
>has to manipulate the configurable part of the engine, hacks work only on top of the engine
current gamdevs are essentially sculpters and rarely creators anymore
i don't like that they use the subtle fog/haze effect to make things look further away because it's much less convincing than the low lod look the original had and it makes the the levels feel smaller
also ironic that a remake of spyro the dragon would have this problem with fog considering that the original is famous for getting rid of the fog while having expansive detailed levels
The problem is access and volume. In the 80-95 the people making games were giga nerds and as such carried a much bigger toolbox and wider array of ideas. In 95-2007ish the middle generation of people who had access to far better technologies still got mentored by incredibly talented people. Should be simple enough so see what happened next. The hoard start development because it is accessible and as always the unwashed mass ruin everything
Spyro was always for cartoony fruity sissy boys so I'm not sure why you spyro fan boys don't like the bottom one... it's right up your alley.
beginning to realize i fricking hate grass
THAT MAN STATUS: HIRED
reignited couldnt have looked more soulless if it tried. tfb are a bunch of fricking hacks
used to be made in some makeshift office or warehouse god knows where
>made by people who were insane enough to dedicate their life and craft to an experimental new medium
>everything was custom built from scratch by in-house employees
>the stuff that wasn't was sourced from some obscure texture/sample CDs you had to hunt down at specialized markets
>OST was made by some guy named Stewart or Satoshi
>little to no oversight from the suits so the bro culture in the office was free to experiment with the budget
>got away with putting wild shit in the games
>absolutely no expectations either for what the game plays like or how much money it will make so you never knew what you were getting
>tons of idiosyncrasies from all the various people that experimented and had input in the game with various skill levels, ideas, life experiences etc
>there was always a rough off-beat vibe to anything, even the most mainstream offerings had a curious unique identity
>visuals and music and gameplay approaches varied wildly from studio to studio and everything had its own personality since each of the devs reality seeped into their work
Nowadays it goes one of two ways
>made in an uptight California/Tokyo office by people who are only there for the paycheck, with either realistic or anime visuals, generic orchestra OST by some famous homosexual plagiarist, using existing software and outsourcing the rest to continental asian sweatshops, micromanaged to soullessness by committee design, every inch is sanitized to appeal to the maximum possible audience, and all the games feel the same despite being made by different studios at different points in time because they're only inspired by other games that sold well and no one with a vision is allowed to interfere
or
>made by a sole literal mentally ill homosexual in his room using free software and a laughable attempt at pixelshit where the gameplay is just a vehicle for his propaganda and a poor copy of an existing old game
>little to no oversight from the suits so the bro culture in the office was free to experiment with the budget
>absolutely no expectations either for what the game plays like or how much money it will make so you never knew what you were getting
you have to be outrageously moronic to believe this.
Naughty Dog went behind Sony's back and broke their hardware rules to pull off a trick that allowed Crash's graphics to be as good as they were
>some guy named Stewart.
IDK if this was intentional but Stewart Copeland, who created the OST for Spyro, was the drummer for The Police. Not exactly just some guy.
Copeland still had "some guy" energy, look at the videos of him composing Spyro's OST, zero pretentiousness or wankery
Because back in the day, a single artist had control of an entire level's art and could make it exactly as they and the director wanted.
Now, art is treated like programming, a largely collaborative effort where the individual's vision doesn't matter and everyone is just looking for "good enough" to get over the high demand workload modern gamedev requires.
AI is actually exciting to me for this precise reason. One man could make games back then easily enough because the standards and expectations were lower in terms of graphics, but one man can't make an AAA title today as there's just too much to do. these are games that take teams of 500 people 5 years and $150 million to produce and they end up soulless as a result due to having to appeal to the widest most casualized market possible to turn profit, appease stockholders, etc, but AI will reach a point where it enables talented and passionate individuals to once again create whatever is considered to be AAA-quality at that time games, by themselves or in very small teams.
Doubt that's going to happen outside of a few passionate individuals, my man, AI has already been integrated into AAA/commercial workflow with technicians and they're just being used to do the same disparate visionless shit, just faster. They've already lowered people's expectations for quality and don't want to raise them.
AI won't do that so you can stop shilling it. AI will only enable more soulless products because it's tailor made for corporate boards and made by committee.
People worth their salt are in software dev or consulting roles where they earn at least 2x what they'd get doing games per hour.
It's not even a debate, objectively speaking the N64 had the superior hardware and visual fidelity. This is quantifiable. It's why Sony leaned so hard into the "WOAH DUDE LOOK AT THE CGI CUTSCENES" angle to distract from the awful in-engine visuals.
I dunno, the cartridge medium created a lot of unnecessary limitations. Had they gone with CDs as well, then Nintendo might have achieved a console gaming monopoly before Microsoft even had a chance to join into the fray.