unpopular retro opinions

[Woolie Wool]

1 hour ago, Maes said:

Scanlines were never a thing.

They absolutely were a thing if you had a nice PC monitor and were playing in low resolution. Again, not every CRT was a TV, many had very fine dot pitch even in the 1990s. I did not have a console for most of my childhood. My CRT memories are of monitors that could do 800×600 or higher, not blurry NTSC.

[ChopBlock223]

• The Nintendo 64 gamepad is nowhere near as bad as some people insist, in fact, it is good.
• Warcraft should have remained RTS.
• Diablo is in many ways better than Diablo 2. The less said about Diablo 3 the better.
• Morrowind is categorically better than Daggerfall, which I feel leans too much towards quantity over quality, Morrowind is mostly better off for shedding needless baggage from its predecessor.
• The itentions of developers, either sourced truthfully or from imagination, is often given a little bit too much weight.
• I don't miss CRT displays. At all.

[Murdoch]

2 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

Morrowind is categorically better than Daggerfall, which I feel leans too much towards quantity over quality, Morrowind is mostly better off for shedding needless baggage from its predecessor.

 

Is this seriously considered controversial? I would have thought it painfully obvious. Daggerfall had some neat features but was by and large a buggy bloated mess.

[Maes]

@Woolie WoolWelo, let's say they never existed in the super-exaggerated way most "scanline emulators" or "enhancers" portray them. Kinda like RL in the 1980s was not actually like Kung Fury ;-)

 

Especially not in an arcade or home console setting, which used TVs or TV-like displays. On dedicated computer monitors, esp. CGA or even Amiga, yeah, they were a thing, but on any decent 1990s SVGA  monitor they were already nowhere to be found, unless you really messed up with the controls or tried weird video modes.

 

 

[Woolie Wool]

Scanlines get more pronounced with more advanced monitors. When you're running a 400-line resolution (whether 320x200 or 640x400), a finer dot pitch means the lines drawn are narrower, which means more obvious scanlines. I have a 21" Trinitron that can draw to 1600x1200 and beyond, and its scanlines in DOS games are as extreme as an emulator overlay (scanlines, of course, get smaller and then disappear entirely as the resolution goes up, certainly you won't be seeing them with 1200 lines). Granted, that's a monitor from the early 2000s, but it was continuing trends that were already in place in 1993 when my earliest video game memories were formed. In fact, those very emulators that that quote mentioned inspiring CRT overlays were often displayed in their heyday by exactly such 1600x1200 "super-CRTs", and those selfsame CRTs would have also had very "hard pixels" as well.

 

Now, this is not to say CRT emulators are accurate, in fact I think they look utterly ridiculous for the most part. But scanlines, in the specific context of low-res games on SVGA monitors, were definitely A Thing and they became even more of A Thing over time until CRTs died out.

 

On that note, I think a lot of younger people here (of course not you @Maes) have no appreciation of how separate the world of "computer games" and "video games" were in the 1990s and even moreso in the 1980s. PC games were made by different companies, for different audiences, and with different sensibilities from console games, and many people grew up with one but not the other. When other kids were arguing over Nintendo vs. Sega, there were always PC geeks who didn't really care about either. Some "hit" titles may have made it cross-platform, but they rarely sold anywhere near as well or were anywhere near as good as on the mother platform--the few ports that you did get were usually much closer in quality to Doom 32X than Doom 64. For the most part, PC and consoles not only had separate games libraries, but separate game genres, and rarely did the "other side's" genres well--I distinctly remember playing many PC platformers, and being immediately impressed when I first played Sonic the Hedgehog at how vastly superior it was to any of them.

 

And that leads to a third unpopular opinion: PC platformers sucked. They sometimes had nice visuals and music, but the controls and gamefeel were always clumsy and primitive compared to good 2D console games. Jazz Jackrabbit is a prime example--great art, amazing music, atrocious jumping physics.

Edited April 14, 2022 by Woolie Wool

[INfront95]

Fallout 1 is more consistent in gameplay,progression,atmosphere, and overall better experience than Fallout 2

[Eurisko]

The original Halo is boring as fook

[rzh]

6 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

• Diablo is in many ways better than Diablo 2. The less said about Diablo 3 the better.

 

42 minutes ago, INfront95 said:

Fallout 1 is more consistent in gameplay,progression,atmosphere, and overall better experience than Fallout 2

To add to the list of first game better than sequel which is more popular series:

• Thief - The Dark Project has a much better atmosphere, much more varied encounters and level themes, which make it more appealing than The Metal Age
• Descent 1 - Better textures, better music, more memorable enemy roster, less bloat, also miles harder except for the bullshit bosses in Descent 2

[Scrabbs]

Sonic 3 and Knuckles is easily the best game of its generation and it's not even close

[xX_Lol6_Xx]

Going back to the topic...

 

I think Strife is cool. Hadn't really played it, but I've seen footage of the game and I do like it's concept and the RPG elements. 

It's a shame it didn't get much attention

 

Edited April 15, 2022 by Lol 6
Added some stuff, not important lol

[Captain red pants]

4 hours ago, Woolie Wool said:

And that leads to a third unpopular opinion: PC platformers sucked. They sometimes had nice visuals and music, but the controls and gamefeel were always clumsy and primitive compared to good 2D console games. Jazz Jackrabbit is a prime example--great art, amazing music, atrocious jumping physics.

Sounds like somebody never had a Gravis PC GamePad™

[Woolie Wool]

I did not have one in the day but I have played DOS platformers with both joystick port gamepads under real hardware and USB gamepads under DOSBox and they are only a partial solution. A gamepad cannot make up for poorly tuned movement physics or laggy control inputs, nor the lack of the practical experience in tuning said controls and physics that the Japanese platformer developers had in spades.

Edited April 15, 2022 by Woolie Wool

[ReaperAA]

3 hours ago, rzh said:

Descent 1 - Better textures, better music, more memorable enemy roster, less bloat, also miles harder except for the bullshit bosses in Descent 2

 

I partially agree. Although I too slightly prefer Descent 1 over 2, there are some things that each does better than the other:

 

Things Descent 1 does better:

• better textures and better music
• better level design (D2's level are too convoluted)
• more balanced bosses (The ice world boss and the final boss of D2 can just go to hell)
• no annoying thief bots (thankfully I can turn them off in D2X-Rebirth)
• no stupid one time secrets (what were devs thinking when they added those in D2)
• no OP weapon that makes some other weapon obsolete (like gauss cannon in D2, which makes vulcan cannon obsolete)
• un-nerfed Fusion Cannon (yes, for those who don't know, Fusion Cannon is much weaker in D2)

 

Things Descent 2 does better:

• no Class 1 Driller type BS enemy (those surpass even Blood's cultists in terms of how BS they are)
• likewise, Lou Guards (the red hulk equivalent enemies of D2) are also much more bearable than the red hulks of D1
• Guide bot (I like those little guys and they are definitely useful when you get lost)
• useful QoL items (like the flashlight or the energy-shield transfer item)
• better vulcan/gauss ammo capacity (D1 has way too low vulcan ammo capacity)

[Mr. Freeze]

The best Descent is Descent: FreeSpace

[PsychEyeball]

45 minutes ago, Captain red pants said:

Sounds like somebody never had a Gravis PC GamePad™

Here's my unpopular retro opinion. The Gravis Gamepad was bad and I hate it. I didn't know any better as a kid and gleefully used it for every game imaginable, including Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. But looking back at it, this was not great to use at all. The Dpad on this thing was so stiff.

 

Also why did it have 4 buttons if only 2 of them do anything different?

 

At some point we had the Gravis Gamepad Pro, which was USB and supported a whole lot more buttons, but making it work with Windows was an eternal struggle. Most of the time the system wouldn't acknowledge the gamepad had the correct configuration so it just acted like a basic Gravis Gamepad with its grand total of 2 buttons that work. 

 

Also re: Jazz Jackrabbit. This game's main problem was that your character could run so fast and yet the screen was so tiny, so unless you had invincibility on, you'd get hit by every possible enemy or hazard imaginable because you can't react in time, forcing the game to become a stop and go simulator. Also how did this game get so much praise considering the CD version of the game featured an impossible stage because the physics of the floppy and CD version of the game aren't the same, therefore breaking some gameplay elements?!?

 

For the record, that only got patched very recently. So if you had the CD version, you couldn't play Episode 2 at all because of that one Orbitus level. 

Edited April 15, 2022 by PsychEyeball

[Cacodemon345]

3 hours ago, PsychEyeball said:

Also re: Jazz Jackrabbit. This game's main problem was that your character could run so fast and yet the screen was so tiny, so unless you had invincibility on, you'd get hit by every possible enemy or hazard imaginable because you can't react in time, forcing the game to become a stop and go simulator. Also how did this game get so much praise considering the CD version of the game featured an impossible stage because the physics of the floppy and CD version of the game aren't the same, therefore breaking some gameplay elements?!?

It got the praise for its 60 FPS, 256-color graphics and the gameplay mechanics drew inspiration from both Sonic (fast character) and Metroid (guns and shooting). It also got released during the time when Doom was still known for 35 FPS. That's what got it a lot of praise.

[Jello]

4 hours ago, PsychEyeball said:

Here's my unpopular retro opinion. The Gravis Gamepad was bad and I hate it. I didn't know any better as a kid and gleefully used it for every game imaginable, including Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. But looking back at it, this was not great to use at all. The Dpad on this thing was so stiff.

 

Also why did it have 4 buttons if only 2 of them do anything different?

 

At some point we had the Gravis Gamepad Pro, which was USB and supported a whole lot more buttons, but making it work with Windows was an eternal struggle. Most of the time the system wouldn't acknowledge the gamepad had the correct configuration so it just acted like a basic Gravis Gamepad with its grand total of 2 buttons that work. 

I bought a gamepad so I could play Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy 7 on my PC, along with Heretic. It wasn't a Gravis, and looking back I'm glad my family never bought one, but it looked really neat. It was basically a copy of the PS1 controller, with a contoured rubber circle around the d-pad. It controlled like absolute ass. The d-pad wasn't responsive. More often than not I would kill myself in Tomb Raider trying to get close to an edge so I could jump, and then Lara would just run off a cliff and die. The buttons weren't much better, more often than not it would hit slightly off and trigger a different button. I've never found joysticks to be useful on a PC aside from flight and mech simulators; and even then it's just more for the "feeling" of piloting a large airplane or vessel. 

 

I'm really glad that the 360 controller (and X-BOX) onward was adopted as the standard for controllers. The d-pad still sucks, but at least everything else still works. And that may not be popular, but if you had to put up with controllers in the 90's, you would understand just how much better things have gotten.

 

 

As far as my biggest unpopular opinion that I can think of: Sonic the Hedgehog sucked. It kept encouraging you to go faster and faster, and then it would throw something in your way that you couldn't see, because it was off the screen. So you're stopped dead in your tracks, and you have to pick up your rings. And it throws a real monkey wrench into the "gotta go fast" gameplay. And then you reach areas where you have to swim and suck in air and it halts all sense of speed. There was no game balance. 

[Murdoch]

1 hour ago, Jello said:

The d-pad wasn't responsive. More often than not I would kill myself in Tomb Raider trying to get close to an edge so I could jump, and then Lara would just run off a cliff and die.

 

Brother, that was just Tomb Raider being Tomb Raider.

[ChopBlock223]

9 hours ago, Lol 6 said:

Going back to the topic...

 

I think Strife is cool. Hadn't really played it, but I've seen footage of the game and I do like it's concept and the RPG elements. 

It's a shame it didn't get much attention

Strife is cool as hell and I like it a lot, but I also find it somewhat lacking as a game. I really wish tnere was more to it, and it's a shame that it has barely any usermade content.

 

8 hours ago, Captain red pants said:

Sounds like somebody never had a Gravis PC GamePad™

I vaguely recall that thing being absolute garbage.

[Maes]

14 hours ago, Woolie Wool said:

And that leads to a third unpopular opinion: PC platformers sucked. They sometimes had nice visuals and music, but the controls and gamefeel were always clumsy and primitive compared to good 2D console games. Jazz Jackrabbit is a prime example--great art, amazing music, atrocious jumping physics.

 

Actually that's far from an unpopular opinion: it was a fact. Pre-Keen and pre-Jackrabbit platformers simply sucked on the technical level due to limitations on the hardware: no smooth scrolling (or no scrolling at all, in some cases), no hardware sprites, etc. and the comparison with console, arcade or even home computer games was for the most  part unfavorable. Platformers were the PC's greatest weakness, not really a good selling point for the PCs as "gaming platforms" in an era where they were pretty much the dominant genre everywhere else. At best you had the feeling of playing on a much more expensive Amstrad CPC, which was never a good thing.

 

In fact, when I got my first PC in 1994 (kinda late, I know), I was not amused by the (non)availability of classic home computer/arcade platform games for the platform. Either they sucked as I described above, or, most commonly, games that received ports to pretty much any other platform (including ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC) simply didn't exist at all on the good old IBM Pee-Cee. They were never made for it, period. If platformers were your cup of tea, then PCs simply shouldn't be your #1 choice back then. Things eventually did change of course, emulators became a thing, etc. but native offers just sucked.

 

As for Jazz Jackrabbit...I think we were all willing to give it a free pass for what regards the controls and, if you played past Episode 1, the gameplay itself. It simply lacked the depth of a Mario or Sonic game. We all knew, deep inside, that "something" was amiss, but hey, it was the Champion of PC platformers, you couldn't NOT root for it...kinda like Gloom/Alien3D were the "champions" of FPS games on the Amiga.

[Woolie Wool]

I never got a choice in the matter so as a kid, platformers just seemed like these clunky antique things. Consoles weren't really a thing for me--I knew a lot of other kids played on "a Nintendo", and I even got to try it at a friend's house, but the relatively unimpressive titles I tried out (Dr. Mario, Rock n' Roll Racing) didn't really impress on me what the SNES could really do. As for 16-bit home micros, I didn't know they existed and pretty much nobody else seemed to either--I knew secondhand of 8-bit computers, but in the US the PC swept them away and cornered the market very quickly. The Atari ST, Amiga, etc. never really caught on here. As for arcades, my family pushed its financial limits just owning the one 486 machine, to feed quarters into an arcade machine again and again when "we have games at home" was a non-starter. So my entire idea of what electronic games even were was something completely alien to the mainstream historical consciousness of "video games". Wolfenstein 3D and Wing Commander became my archetypal games, not Super Mario Bros.

[dpJudas]

15 hours ago, Woolie Wool said:

Scanlines get more pronounced with more advanced monitors. When you're running a 400-line resolution (whether 320x200 or 640x400), a finer dot pitch means the lines drawn are narrower, which means more obvious scanlines. I have a 21" Trinitron that can draw to 1600x1200 and beyond, and its scanlines in DOS games are as extreme as an emulator overlay (scanlines, of course, get smaller and then disappear entirely as the resolution goes up, certainly you won't be seeing them with 1200 lines). Granted, that's a monitor from the early 2000s, but it was continuing trends that were already in place in 1993 when my earliest video game memories were formed.

Yes, but by the time most people had 21" Trinitron 1600x1200 capable monitors they were way past the 320x200 era. At least I was playing Direct3D games like Unreal Tournament at 800x600 or higher on such monitors.

[Woolie Wool]

4 minutes ago, dpJudas said:

Yes, but by the time most people had 21" Trinitron 1600x1200 capable monitors they were way past the 320x200 era. At least I was playing Direct3D games like Unreal Tournament at 800x600 or higher on such monitors.

I never stopped playing DOS games, not even during the height of their unfashionability. In those days I played lots of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom (and before ZDoom I was limited to 640x400, and even with ZDoom I would drop resolution when framerates tanked in a limit-removing map), Hexen, Wing Commander II, etc. alongside my newer games on a 17" Samsung CRT, and I saw plenty of scanlines. Not to mention lots of games from the late '90s and early 2000s would have their menus or sometimes the entire game locked to 640x480.

Edited April 15, 2022 by Woolie Wool

[dpJudas]

I'm not denying that there aren't scanlines with such a monitor in 320x200. Rather, I'm just saying that if you put an emulator on that shows scanlines like that then it isn't remotely looking like how most people would have seen the game on a CRT from the mid 90's.

[Woolie Wool]

So you didn't read my posts properly and you're arguing against something I didn't actually say, instead of my much narrower point contesting the blanket statement of "scanlines didn't exist".

[GraphicBleeder]

The N64 sucked and people shouldn't overhype it as some legendary forgotten masterpiece like they do.

[dpJudas]

7 minutes ago, Woolie Wool said:

So you didn't read my posts properly and you're arguing against something I didn't actually say, instead of my much narrower point contesting the blanket statement of "scanlines didn't exist".

The reason your post annoys me is simply that you take a monitor from a different era and uses it as example of why scanlines were certainly a thing in the 320x200 era of gaming. Don't forget which post from Maes you originally replied to. Now I'm sure you will reply that you didn't say anything about which era you were commenting about, or find the most expensive office monitor around from 1995 to show you could theoretically experience it. :)

[Woolie Wool]

I also mentioned they were visible (though less so) in the monitor I had in the '90s, which was a 15" model that did at least 800x600 (I never knew whether the video memory or the monitor was the limiting factor).

[rzh]

13 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

Things Descent 1 does better:

• better textures and better music
• better level design (D2's level are too convoluted)
• more balanced bosses (The ice world boss and the final boss of D2 can just go to hell)
• no annoying thief bots (thankfully I can turn them off in D2X-Rebirth)
• no stupid one time secrets (what were devs thinking when they added those in D2)
• no OP weapon that makes some other weapon obsolete (like gauss cannon in D2, which makes vulcan cannon obsolete)
• un-nerfed Fusion Cannon (yes, for those who don't know, Fusion Cannon is much weaker in D2)

I agree with all of these.

 

13 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

Things Descent 2 does better:

• no Class 1 Driller type BS enemy (those surpass even Blood's cultists in terms of how BS they are)
• likewise, Lou Guards (the red hulk equivalent enemies of D2) are also much more bearable than the red hulks of D1
• Guide bot (I like those little guys and they are definitely useful when you get lost)
• useful QoL items (like the flashlight or the energy-shield transfer item)
• better vulcan/gauss ammo capacity (D1 has way too low vulcan ammo capacity)

But I actually disagree with most of these 😂

Call me a Descent 1 apologist, but I grew to love how BS the Class 1 Drillers and Red Hulks were. I felt like playing through Plutonia for the first time.

I also never used the Guidebot.

The flashlight was ok, but I felt like levels in Descent 2 were way darker than those in Descent to compensate, which I didn't like.

The afterburner was one of the things I felt were missing from Descent 1 but I also like Descent 1's slower pace so I'm kinda torn on it.

The converter is also something I have mixed feelings about. It felt like it removed a lot of the tension and skill from the game, but one couldn't argue that it wasn't useful.

I agree with the vulcan ammo capacity. I barely used it first time around because of ammo consumption and low damage but it's insanely good at stunning enemies so more ammo would've fit it nicely.

The best thing Descent 2 has over 1 though is the resolution, while 1 was limited to standard 320x200, Descent 2 supports 640x400 natively on appropiate hardware, I believe.

Hardly counts today when most people use DXX Rebirth, but I'm actually using Chocolate Descent.

[ChopBlock223]

22 hours ago, GraphicBleeder said:

The N64 sucked and people shouldn't overhype it as some legendary forgotten masterpiece like they do.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone describe the N64 as forgotten. The main complaint I see is lacking 3rd party support, which isn't unfounded.

Edited April 16, 2022 by ChopBlock223