The 2024 Backlog Challenge

[twiztor | 916]

5 hours ago, Sumez said:

0.08sec is nearly 5 frames of lag. IMO that's pretty much the threshold of tolerable.

i don't know if you're saying 0.08 seconds is the most or the least that you can tolerate, but i am definitely glad that i wouldn't even notice that in most cases. stuff like "framerate drops" and "input lag" have to be EGREGIOUS before i even recognize them. In most cases, i just accept that as a part of the game and do my best to incorporate that into my play. 

i'll stick with my toploader NES on my 1983 console TV. I never even noticed the 'jail bars' from using the toploader until i saw it mentioned online. Hell, i'm perfectly happy watching VHS quality movies. IDGAF about HD or 1080p or 120hz refresh rate or any of that stuff. I guess i just spent too many years grateful for even getting to watch/play these things.

[Sumez | 3,152]

If you're playing an action game that relies on perfect timing and quick reactions, like Ninja Gaiden, Tetris, or Bubble Bobble, it's not a question of you noticing the input lag, it's a question of the game feeling worse to play and likely even being unnecessarily difficult.

And without any basis for comparison it's likely you'd never notice you're playing a worse version of the same game I probably don't actively "notice" input lag until we're on the 8 frame range or so either.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,912]

I've reached the final boss of the Erdtree expansion, but haven't attempted it yet. 

I've heard horror stories.  Malenia is the only fight I ever used an ash summon (or any kind of summon) for, and I'd like to maintain that.  Guess we'll see.

[Philosoraptor | 482]

11 hours ago, Sumez said:

0.01 seconds is really good. Of course, this is as far as I can understand based on your own measurements, so I guess it's 0.01 over that of a CRT.

But just to clarify.
At a 60FPS game (which is basically every console game up until the 16bit generation), one frame is 16.6 miliseconds - that is, ~0.017 seconds.

Yup! You hinted at it, but during my research, I found out by the way we measure lag today, CRTs do have lag. Because they draw the picture in lines starting from the top left and ending at the bottom right and because input lag is typically measured in the middle of the screen, even though CRTs start displaying the picture nearly instantaneously, it takes 16.6 milliseconds to finish drawing the frame, making a CRT's lag measurement typically .0083 seconds. 

Since I don't own a CRT, my measurements are just the best approximations I could make with a phone camera running at 60fps. I didn't factor in a CRT's input lag at all. I'd hold the controller up to the screen with the ship or character in the background and press a button to get movement. Later, I'd count the frames to determine how long it'd take the display to respond when the button was fully depressed on the controller. It's low tech, but it's what I had. I also ended up doing it for a bunch of handhelds just because I was curious, and they mostly ended up with response times of .06 or .07 seconds for the games I tested (first-party games, mostly).

I also pulled the specs for my screens off of various review sites. My monitors have .011 seconds of lag, and my TV has around .025 seconds of lag in its native resolutions (1080p and 720p) and as much as .047 seconds of lag for 480i (RIP PS2 and Dreamcast SHMUPS). So, the rest of the lag I measured is coming from the game itself, the console, or the controller (for example, the wireless Retro Fighters N64 controllers I own do introduce a little extra lag over official wired Nintendo controllers).

I didn't own a Retrotink when I took the initial measurements, but after I took them, it was clear I needed an upscaler to get to my TV's native resolution. The Retrotink 5X Pro has about .004 seconds of lag, which is negligible. It ended up shaving ~.02 seconds off the response times for the PS2 games I tested later and made them prettier in the process.

11 hours ago, Sumez said:

The way a video game typically works is that it spends a frame calculating what is going to happen on the next frame, so it's ready to draw it before it gets sent to the TV. This is what we consider "zero lag".
In practice, that means in a "worst case scenario", you'll push the button while the game logic of a frame is being calculated but after it polled the input for that frame. So you'll have wait that entire frame, and then it'll start processing your input on the next frame while you're seeing the frame calculated previously. You won't actually see the effect of your input one frame later when that one starts being drawn. That's roughly 0.03 seconds. On top of that, it'll be another 0.017 before that frame is drawn entirely, due to the progressive nature of CRTs drawing a picture.

That is, again in a worst-case scenario, a total of 0.047 seconds based on game logic alone. I'd still say a CRT is "zero" lag, because the signal actually sent from the console itself, is seen on the CRT zero miliseconds later.

So if you're measuring 10 miliseconds of lag on your HDTV, I think that is basically nothing on top of what you get from a CRT.
0.08sec is nearly 5 frames of lag. IMO that's pretty much the threshold of tolerable. All depending on the game, really.

Interesting. I'd never thought of it in terms of programming. That's fascinating! That makes a ton of sense and explains why none of my measurements on handhelds ever got below .06 seconds. 

I agree with you that a CRT is the gold standard and is the closest thing you can get to zero lag. And yep. I considered buying a new TV as well, but the input lag I was getting post-Retrotink wasn't enough to warrant the purchase. Almost all my measurements were .07 or .08 seconds of lag on my TV. Smash Ultimate ended up being .09. If I really, really need near lagless input, I can always hook something up to my monitor, which is about a frame faster.

The only console that routinely spat out over .1 seconds of lag was the Retron 5 (.1-.14 seconds, specifically). The only other major blip I measured was Cotton 2 on the Cotton Guardian Force Saturn Tribute. It had .15 seconds of lag, but it's also known to be a very, very laggy game.

5 hours ago, twiztor said:

i don't know if you're saying 0.08 seconds is the most or the least that you can tolerate, but i am definitely glad that i wouldn't even notice that in most cases. stuff like "framerate drops" and "input lag" have to be EGREGIOUS before i even recognize them. In most cases, i just accept that as a part of the game and do my best to incorporate that into my play. 

i'll stick with my toploader NES on my 1983 console TV. I never even noticed the 'jail bars' from using the toploader until i saw it mentioned online. Hell, i'm perfectly happy watching VHS quality movies. IDGAF about HD or 1080p or 120hz refresh rate or any of that stuff. I guess i just spent too many years grateful for even getting to watch/play these things.

The TV I did my tests on was a LCD TV I bought from a Wal-Mart in the 2000s. If you're playing on original hardware with even a decent TV, you're probably not going to notice input lag. If you use a CRT, that's a best-case scenario.

The only reason I got curious is I felt some games were sluggish, especially when playing on the Retron 5 and playing PS2 SHMUPs.

.08ish seconds feels good to me, and I don't notice anything really amiss with the game. At .10 seconds or more, I start noticing more of a delay and make more mental complaints about "I jumped" or "I pressed the button."

Edited September 4 by Philosoraptor

[Reed Rothchild | 9,912]

I've been playing a lot of Trails 3 as I watch some shows at night.  Actually think I should be able to knock it out in September, which would be a much faster turnaround than the first two games.

Put Final Fantasy XVI on a short hold while I finish the Elden Ring DLC.  I can't help it; I love that game too much.  And this time I got my boys sucked into it with me.

I can't help but always have a game in progress with my 3DS, so a couple months ago I started The World Ends With You.  And I do not care for it all that much.  Annoying touchscreen controls, repetitive combat, a confusing city to continuously run circles through, a general Tokyo youth/fashion theme that is 100% not interesting... I'm very tempted to just drop it.  But it's also so easy that I figure I may as well just finish and close the book on it.

Once I finish Trails 3 I think I'm gonna start Shin Megami 5, and after FFXVI it's gonna be GTA5.  And then at some point I need to pick Dragons Dogma back up, since all I have left is the endgame and the rest of the Dark Arisen expansion.

 

[Reed Rothchild | 9,912]

Side quest: Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree

I'm an unabashed ER lover.  I spent 90 hours completely captivated by the main game, and I just spent another 40 hours being completely drawn into the expansion.  I love exploring the world, finding the little nooks and crannies, and secrets zones and locations.  It's crazy to me, that you have to play this game for at least 120 hours in order to reach, for example, the gloomy mansion hiding in the roots of the Shadow lands.  I'm assuming 99% of players will never see the place.  But they still crafted an atmospheric dungeon with a cool boss for that tiny minority.  Or boss fight against the fingers.  Or the corrupted sunflower boss.  Just stuff to keep finding the more you dig.

I actually got through the final boss without an ash summon (the same can't be said for my fight against Malenia), though I did give up after 50 attempts and read some online advice.  I ended up using a scarlet rot rapier, which seemed even more broken than the Mimic Tear.  If I ever do a New Game+ I might test out the rapier in the rest of the game and see if it's as OP with the rest of the bosses.

Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree (10/10)
God of War Ragnarok (9.5/10)
Resident Evil Village (9.5/10)
Bloodborne (9.5/10)
The Witness (9/10)
Tunic (9/10)
Inscryption (8.5/10)
Yakuza 2 Kiwami (8.5/10)
Firewatch (8.5/10)
Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (8/10)
Horizon Zero Dawn (8/10)
Spider-Man (8/10)
Bayonetta 3 (8/10)
Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations (7.5/10)
The Walking Dead Complete (7.5/10)
Rise of the Tomb Raider (7.5/10)
The Stanley Parable (7.5/10)
Resident Evil 3 (7.5/10)
The Talos Principle (7/10)
The Quarry (7/10)
A Plague Tale: Innocence (7/10)
Bravely Default (6.5/10)
Pikmin 1 (6.5/10)
Dark Forces (5.5/10)
Beyond Oasis (5/10)
Turok 3 (4.5/10)

[Sumez | 3,152]

On 9/4/2024 at 10:10 PM, Philosoraptor said:

because input lag is typically measured in the middle of the screen, even though CRTs start displaying the picture nearly instantaneously, it takes 16.6 milliseconds to finish drawing the frame, making a CRT's lag measurement typically .0083 seconds. 

Yeah the important thing to consider is that that "lag" doesn't come from the CRT itself, but the way the image is transferred to it as well. So you couldn't hook up an actual hardware NES to some magical super low-lag display device and get less lag than a CRT. You'd still have to wait for the NES to spend roughly 16 miliseconds transferring that frame, one pixel at a time. And hell, especially on older systems, some games are designed around that process and alter things during the drawing period, so you can't just skip it.

In fact, you could *theoretically* make a super simple NES "game" which only changes things on the scanline the vertical middle of the screen, and polls input immediately before it's drawn. You'd get lag less than 8 miliseconds on a CRT this way, but it wouldn't be a very exciting game.  

[T-Pac | 7,855]

35/40 - Gyruss [Nintendo Entertainment System - 1989]

Finished: 2024/09/08

Caveats: Used turbo-fire and the Konami Code (backwards) for 30 lives.

[T-Pac]

[Sumez | 3,152]

T-Pac has posted... how many of these?... And I only just realised he's making videos where he talks about the game, instead of just a drawing.
I was wondering why he had nothing to say about all these things he played.

[T-Pac | 7,855]

29 minutes ago, Sumez said:

T-Pac has posted... how many of these?... And I only just realised he's making videos where he talks about the game, instead of just a drawing.
I was wondering why he had nothing to say about all these things he played.

Haha - well I should warn you if you choose to watch them: I'm pretty sure you and I like / dislike the same games for diametrically opposed reasons.

[T-Pac]

[Sumez | 3,152]

I'd love to watch them all, but I don't really have the time, dedication and patience for video based analysis. Text format is much easier to digest while doing other things. Gonna go back and check out some of them when I get the time however, it's cool you're doing it.

[Sumez | 3,152]

Outer Wilds (PS5) - Beaten 1/9

I'll keep this brief and spoiler-free, because Outer Wilds is a game 100% about exploration and discovery, and the best way to experience is by going in knowing nothing!

So here's what you're told within the first minute from booting up the game: You are going into space, and you're going on a rickety old rocket ship, pieced together from wood and duct tape, and some magical space crystals your friends found lying around.
You're given a short tour of what to look out for up there, which serves as a nice foreshadowing of odd things you aren't going to be able to see coming anyway, and then it's off into the unknown!

Some of the ideas that make up the world of Outer Wilds are so strange that the "plot" is going to feel very fractured at first, as you discover various bits of what's been going on in space. But don't worry, the game will make sure to spell out every single detail for you before you reach the end. Not that that detracts from it, though. The sense of piecing things together and that a-ha moment when you find the explanation for something that had previously puzzled you in the opposite end of the solar system, is absolutely present.

And that really is the core of the game. You acquire very few abilities throughout the game, and pretty much all of them are things that you as the player learn, not in-game mechanics that get unlocked. It is honestly amazing how many creative ways "this is where you need to go" can turn out to be a mind-blowing key to a puzzle. Of course, it helps that just "going somewhere" in this game isn't like playing Skyrim where you just pick a direction and walk, so knowing where you are actually headed can be quite a beacon through the obscure Outer Space of Outer Wilds.

That's another thing I think really sets this game apart, and again this is something you'll just have to take my word for, because you really have to see it for yourself. The world feels compact, but the myriad of creative ideas that make up the various areas you will be visiting, is honestly stuff that I feel I have never seen before in a video game, at least not quite like this.
I can't imagine the amount of work put into this masterpiece of exploration-focused game design, compared to what I went into expecting a quaint little indie walking simulator. I had originally planned on playing this on Switch, but I'm glad I ended up picking a stronger console for the job. I can't imagine how much the handheld would have struggled with everything this game does.

[JamesRobot | 6,022]

Metroid II: Samus Returns - GB: Beat 9/9/2024

Wrapped up the Game Boy portion of my backlog with Metroid II: Electric Boogaloo.  While it's a more straightforward adventure than the original, it's pretty massive for a Game Boy game and a solid portable experience. 

My only minor criticism is regarding some of the music choices.  Some areas have a great soundtrack lending to the overall atmosphere one would expect from the series but others are.. less immersive, almost bringing me out of the experience.  But hey, I'm not really complaining here.

I went all-in without referencing online help or maps and put in a respectable laughable 10 hours, receiving the "bad" ending.  But I'm an explorer and sought out as many secrets as possible.  In the end, I only missed two missile upgrades.  I definitely got lost a couple times hunting Metroids and padding my overall time.  But I became more familiar with the overall layout and mechanics of the map as time went on.  I'm sure I could get a better ending if I decided to give it another go.  But that's not in the cards for a while, and I'm sure I will forget much by the next go round.

Top tier Game Boy title to be sure.  Probably an 8/9 overall.

[Tantalus | 493]

It's been a while since I had any updates for this thread, but tonight I finished up Kirby's Dreamland 2. I played it via the Switch online service.

It's alright, but similar to my experience with most Kirby games, I went into it expecting to like it more than I actually did.

[twiztor | 916]

Dark Void: Zero
kind of a cool story around this one. back in 2010, Capcom released an XBox game called "Dark Void". to hype up the release, they released this game, which was supposedly an unreleased game from the NES. while the story is nonsense, the game is a really cool representation of that era. 
this is a platformer in which you utilize a jetpack and blast away the invading alien forces. the mechanics remind me quite a bit of Bionic Commando.
this was a bit short but had some challenging areas and bosses. really fun. if you like retro games and haven't played this one, it's worth checking out.

[JamesRobot | 6,022]

7 hours ago, twiztor said:

mechanics remind me quite a bit of Bionic Commando.

What's that you say?    

 

[Sumez | 3,152]

Ninja Gaiden Black - Beaten 6/9

In the twenty year timespan since I last played the Ninja Gaiden reboot on the original Xbox, the modern series (the first two games anyway) has expanded from being a curious revival of a classic series into almost taking over the staples of the brand depending on who you ask. I never finished the game - it ended up being so difficult that I found a single move which had the tradeoff of trivializing most encounters instead, which also isn't enjoyable.

The reception for the game was extremely positive, and it managed to break into a mainstream audience for a very short while. But in more nerdy circles it has only continued to garner increasingly more respect ever since, arguably still representing the epitome of this style of 3D combat action for people wanting a survival-focused alternative to the more flashy combo-centric brawls of Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. In short, I found this series worth returning to, because those games' abstract approach to action gameplay never really appealed to me as much as simply employing your skills to escape unscathed.

In this game Ryu Hayabusa finds his entire ninja clan murdered by a mysterious demon samurai. He very quickly learns that this samurai is allegedly tied to the emperor of some reclusive foreign nation, and promptly decides to retaliate by fucking this entire country up. Yeah, you aren't a Ninja in this game as much as you're a god damn terrorist, but it's kind of fun all the same.

The game blew a lot of minds with its graphics when it came out, and to be honest, I think it still looks really good. It upscales nicely to a HDTV without looking dated, partly thanks to the built-in 16:9 support which was fortunately somewhat standard on the original Xbox despite how uncommon widescreen CRTs were even at the time.

The core gameplay is solid as hell. You get a block button which can also be used to employ an evasive roll, as well as the typical two attack buttons which can do all kinds of crazy moves when combined in colorful ways. The number of moves you get is a little overwhelming, and I would probably have enjoyed a more lean game. But the way they can be employed in different situations definitely lends a lot of incredible depth to the game.
The first thing you need to learn is that you need to block a LOT. Basically, block whenever you aren't attacking. But you also can't afford your enemies to catch a whiff of your defensive tactics, or they'll try to throw you instead. So you need to rely on moving around just as much, jumping and using the environment to your advantage. Chaining rolls and jumps can help maintain a continuous unbroken motion is definitely something you need to learn as well.

But this is also where the game's biggest flaw shows itself. The zoomed in camera combined with your agile movements very rarely provides for a useful overview of your fight, and fighting well often relies more on assuming what your enemies are doing than actually seeing it.
If you're busy fucking up one dude, you know there's someone else just off-camera about to launch a powerful attack on you, and hell, half the time you won't even be looking at the enemies you're currently targeting either. It's a pretty abysmal issue with an otherwise incredibly strong game.
The version I played, Ninja Gaiden Black, adopts a camera improvement introduced in a DLC pack from the original game, which definitely helps the issue a bit. But it's still quite limited what you can do with it, since turning around the camera takes a long time, and by the time you get it in place, everything will have moved around regardless.

Another big issue - my only other issue with the game to be honest - is the lack of enemy variation. Early on you'll be facing a nice variety of dudes, from various kinds of ninja to military troops. But around halfway into the game you'll be dropping into some underground caves and crypts, and from that point on you'll almost exclusively be facing the same clawed beast. Over, over, and over again. It's the exact same fight every single time. Even with a combat system as fleshed out as Ninja Gaiden Black's, it gets really repeitive going through the same fight so many times.

Fortunately, the game breaks up those encounters with a mostly pretty entertaining adventure element, instead of just pushing the player through a series of linear arenas like many other similar games of the era did.
While it's not as exciting as the combat, it provides a cool contrast, and even though the story is broken up into individual "chapters", those aren't segregated stages, and as you progress through the game you'll be opening up paths between all the areas you've previously been, so you can always go where you want, should you want to go back and pick up something you missed, or some of the additional secrets unlocked towards the end.

At times the adventure aspect actually feels a lot like a horror game. The reverb-laden UI sounds, the eerie way descriptive text is silently planted over a freeze-frame, and of course the abstract place-symbol-into-indentation-to-unlock-door puzzles. I can't fully tell if this is tied to the game owing its lineage to Devil May Cry - or if it's simply just the way games were designed back then. Either way it honestly gives Ninja Gaiden Black a pretty cool atmosphere, especially fitting for the introduction chapters where you witness the aftermath of your clan getting slaughtered.

The modern Ninja Gaiden is pretty close to an ideal 3D action game to me this side of the Souls series. Hell, some of the boss fights even feel right out of Dark Souls. If it weren't for the repetitive encounters and massive camera issues, this could have been a favourite of mine, maybe even a 10/10 game. But alas, it's not quite there. It's merely a really fun game.

[twiztor | 916]

i've taken a few runs at Awesome Possum on the Genesis. a friend lent it to me like a year ago and i've been trying to make an earnest attempt at enjoying it.

this game is known for its main character, the titular Awesome Possum, who is a thinly veiled Sonic ripoff that speaks....a lot.... in cringey 90s buzzwords. i thought that would be the most annoying part of this, but i was so off base. first, i didn't even find him as annoying as his reputation would have one believe.

Every choice the developers made was the wrong one. 
sprites are too big so lots of leaps of faith/getting hit by unseen enemies. levels are too long with no sense of progression. controls are slippery. hit detection is all sorts of janky. movement is simultaneously too slow and too fast. most importantly, it's incredibly repetitive and just not fun.

 

 

edited to add: you know what? fuck this, i'm not enjoying Revenge of Shinobi either. the controls aren't crisp enough (this double jump only works for me like 40% of the time), there's lots of off screen enemies, and again i'm just not having fun. if i grew up with this game i would probably have a better time with it, but it's just not doing it for me.

Edited Thursday at 04:32 PM by twiztor

[Reed Rothchild | 9,912]

My kids kept begging me to do New Game+ in Elden Ring, so I did the next best thing: moved on to Dark Souls III.  This is the last remaining Soulsborne for me.  Not counting Demon's Souls remake.