/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.10698164]

Why did so many devs get filtered by Emotion Engine?

[Anonymous No.10698231]

>>10698164
>Games are split between IOP/EE tasks, each have their own compilers and quirks
>Every co-processor needs to be manually DMA'd data (yes - EE, VU0, VU1, GS, IOP and SPU)
>GIF data package needs optimizing to get the best performance
>SDK/docs provided by Sony were lacklusters, and Metrowerks was often a requirement for most studios unless you were fine with GDB/printf debugging 200k+ LOC
>VU were amazingly fast, at extremely limited tasks. When CodeWarrior 2.5 dropped devs were finally able to realtime debug the VU
>Unless you were under a first party company/publisher, you got zero support from Sony

[Anonymous No.10698465]

>>10698164
>RenderWare's principal commercial importance was in providing an off-the-shelf solution to the difficulties of PS2 graphics programming. As such, the engine was often described as "Sony's DirectX" during this era which was a reference to its surrounding framework and toolchain middleware.
RenderWare saved the whole generation, not only the sony's console.

[Anonymous No.10698479]

Another of these threads?
Man, for the supposed gigantic library of the PS2, there sure is very small discussion about the games. All the PS2 threads are "why was it such great system that sold the most?" "Why did it have such amazing giant library?" "Why did developers get filtered by it's amazing hardware?"
It's always about how great it is, or how much it sold, or how many games it has... But where's the actual discussion about the games?

[Anonymous No.10698697]

they were pajeets

it's just a custom mips architecture that a bachelors graduate could learn and program for.

[Anonymous No.10698706]

My father-in-law is an engineer. He is insanely gifted. We were playing san andreas for the ps2 together years ago and I asked him what it would cost to build it today with the same lighting and shaders. I will never forget his answer…

“We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.”

[Anonymous No.10698714]

>>10698465
>what kinda game u want
>middling western slop that'll age like milk
>say no more fammy

[Anonymous No.10698718]

>>10698164
For like a year or two I guess? The platform was so popular devs had to get good, and they did get good. How low-spec it was became the limitation rather than the architecture itself being difficult to work with, but talented devs still made Xbox-competitive stuff with it.

[Anonymous No.10698734]

>>10698479
>But where's the actual discussion about the games?
everyone knows the games arent actually retro so shitposting about the hardware is all there is to talk about

[Anonymous No.10698740]

>>10698479
It has basically no actually all-time-great level exclusives. You have games like FFX, Dragon Quest 8, Dark Cloud (1&2), MGS2, Devil May Cry 3, SotC, Gran Turismo 4 etc. and that's more or less it in terms of how great a game you could find uniquely on the PS2 would be. There was nothing like the way the PS1 and N64 would regularly get dozens of earth shattering games in a given year, there was nothing the PS2 did that let it compare with previous gen Zelda, Mario, Banjo, Spyro, Starcraft, Half-Life in quality and innovation. It doesn't even really have 'hidden gems' on the level of Megaman:Legends, Tomba!, Oddworlds, Wild 9 etc. It just has piles and piles of mediocre derivative titles.

Like, the simple fact that the PS3 has Demons and Dark Souls, which can actually compete with the absolute giants of any gen, honestly puts it above the PS2 by that alone.

[Anonymous No.10698743]

>>10698740
mgs2 was on xbox, so was dark souls on the 360

[Anonymous No.10698745]

>>10698714
Tony Hawks 3,4 and THUG were made on renderware so shut your filthy whore mouth.

[Anonymous No.10698861]

>>10698706
A chilling anecdote, anon.

[Anonymous No.10698934]

>>10698740
It's the first modern slopmachine.
Still a lot of good games on it, and in higher quantity than the GC or XBOX but that isn't saying too much.
6th gen was a dissapointment, gone are the days of small studios trying out creative new shit.

[Anonymous No.10698949]

>>10698479
There's just too many games and different demographics to hold a thread about them, it's better off having a general ps2 thread and go from there

[Anonymous No.10698957]

>>10698164
No idea. I probably need *at least* to program a simple game to actually answer your question.

[Anonymous No.10698960]

>>10698697
>they were pajeets
Were they, really?

[Anonymous No.10699380]

>>10698934
Adding 6th gen on /vr/ was a fucking mistake. It only brought more console wars from /v/. It was already bad with 5th gen, and kids LARPing as having been alive during 4th gen, now it's beyond salvation.

[Anonymous No.10699482]

>>10698479
You may have noticed, but when people talk about Nintendo, it's virtually always specific games, and the discussion tends to get quite detailed since there's so much to go on about and break down. Their titles have stood the test of time and it shows. The most you'll get otherwise is discussion on the N64 controller and how stupid it is or wasn't, maybe some bitching about the N64DD.

When it's Sega, it's all about console revisionism, with very little game discussion outside of Sonic. And even that has a bad tendency to turn into stuff like Sonic Adventure ports versus the originals.

Go over to Sony, and it's all talk about how successful their consoles and sales were, and the best discussion you can get out of it is people screaming about how one side isn't remembering why the sales were as high as they are correctly or if it was called the PSX or not. Maybe an ad campaign or two will come up. It's always sales. FF7 comes up? People don't talk about the game, they talk about how much more successful it was than Square's offerings on Nintendo consoles.

Microsoft, the best you'll get is Halo discussion which can be pretty good, which is eventually undercut by those trying to screech about how PC games of the time were better.

[Anonymous No.10699495]

>>10699482
>the discussion tends to get quite detailed since there's so much to go on about and break down. Their titles have stood the test of time and it shows.
What if I don't endlessly replay the same ten games over and over again?

[Anonymous No.10699593]

>>10698164
They were autistic

[Anonymous No.10699641]

>thread about PS2's chip
>immediately ruined by tendie seethe
just rename this board to /vrtendo/ already

[Anonymous No.10699686]

>>10699495
Then that means you don't love games that are so good and so rich that you actively want to play variants over them over and over instead of settling for a variety of lesser games. Mario, Zelda and Perfect Dark can be hacked to do whatever you want now, so why bother with games with inferior design?

>>10699482
FF7 is interesting, because there is a lot to the game and its story, presentation, the materia system, it's secrets etc. are all quite fascinating, but it then just completely lacks core gameplay that isn't slop.

The PS1 has a heap of cool novelties like Bushido Blade that could and should have been a model for future 'arena fighters' to extend.

[Anonymous No.10699929]

>>10698706
Oh damn. Now I wont sleep tonight.

[Chud Anon No.10700020]

>>10698479
It’s just a bunch of grey and brown sequels compared to the colorful world of PSX

>>10698706
Modern rockstar doesn’t know how they made classic GTA games either, given how dogshit the remaster trilogy was

>>10698934
I’d argue Xbox had better games like Ninja Gaiden Black, KOTR, and Mech Assault, but they never get threads here.

[Anonymous No.10700043]

>>10698164
>You are handed a 10-inch thick stack of manuals written by Japanese hardware engineers. The first time you read the stack, nothing makes any sense at all. The second time your read the stack, the 3rd book makes a bit more sense because of what you learned in the 8th book. The machine has 10 different processors (IOP, SPU1&2, MDEC, R5900, VU0&1, GIF, VIF, GS) and 6 different memory spaces (IOP, SPU, CPU, GS, VU0&1) that all work in completely different ways. There are so many amazing things you can do, but everything requires backflips through invisible blades of segfault. Getting the first triangle to appear on the screen took some teams over a month because it involved routing commands through R5900->VIF->VU1->GIF->GS oddities with no feedback about what your were doing wrong until you got every step along the way to be correct. If you were willing to do twist your game to fit the machine, you could get awesome results. There was a debugger for the main CPU (R5900). It worked pretty OK. For the rest of the processors, you just had to write code without bugs.

[Anonymous No.10700109]

>>10698479
Sony games are cool to play when they're released but they're not very good games to reminisce

[Chud Anon No.10700131]

>>10700109
*classic Sony

Modern Sony is movieslop

[Anonymous No.10700175]

>>10698740
>and N64 regularly get dozens of earth shattering games in a given year
Delusional

>there was nothing the PS2 did that let it compare with previous gen Zelda, Mario, Banjo, Spyro, Starcraft, Half-Life in quality and innovation.
Jesus christ.... kys worthless fanboy


>>10700109
>cool to play when they're released but they're not very good games to reminisce
Funny how dozens of popular PS2 games have been ported or remastered to newer consoles. They must be really boring to play, right?!
Like the FFXII Zodiac Age being one of the worst games reviewed on Steam. The recent MGS 3 release? also very hated by the community, right!? Too boring...

[Anonymous No.10700268]

>>10700175
>They must be really boring to play, right?!
Indeed. The gameplay was clearly not a priority with most of them.

[Anonymous No.10700580]

>>10700268
get mental health or find a new hobby

[Anonymous No.10700592]

>>10700580
Retro games are my hobby to avoid movie games.

[Anonymous No.10700645]

>>10698465
RIP criterion.

[Anonymous No.10700648]

>>10698745
Every map after 3 is shit.
Every map.

[Anonymous No.10700656]

>>10699495
That means you actually like video games and shouldn't be on /vr/

[Anonymous No.10700701]

>>10700175
You're completely missing my point and hyper-focusing on the fact that I mentioned the N64 had its share of great games, *along* with that the PS1's, which also had a large number of fantastic titles 'in addition' to those that are traditionally considered it's best that I went out of my way to point out. Honestly, if you can't admit the best N64 games are superior to and more memorable than the best PS2 titles, you're stuck in your own kind of delusion.

Like let's take FFX, which I honestly consider the best exclusive it has and genuinely love. It's really ultimately a richer game than any of the PS1 FFs, if you go out of your way to explore its depth. But let's look at what a 'regular playthrough' of FFVII is like in comparison. The story is more complex and compelling, materia is more fun to collect and play around with compared to the initial sphere grid, you get much more freedom to explore and discover things not essentially on a straight path (including optional party members) much earlier etc. it's much more solid and better about giving you more meat throughout the game, even though FFX (international/remake particularly) has the more substantial end game and better rewards you for re-exploring earlier areas.

Each of the PS2's top titles seem to have similar qualities; they're genuinely really good in certain ways, but then otherwise barer or more filled with tedium than anything equivalently great on the PS1, which had far more excellent 'pick up and play' titles that let you dig into their meat without forcing bullshit on you. Neither Jak and Daxter nor Ratchet compare to the PS1 platformers made by either company. You throw a rock and hit Ape Escape or Medievil, and can play multiple great Tomb Raiders on the thing.

[Anonymous No.10700792]

>>10700701
As time went on, non-Nintendo games got more and more backloaded with hours and hours of padding and cutscenes before anything interesting or fun happens. It's infuriating honestly. FF7 was successful precisely because it knew exactly how to start an RPG: There's a brief, impressive FMV that has you gripped before you're dropped right into a big mission and the game keeps rolling at a snappy pace with the cutscenes all being interesting yet short enough to tell a gripping story while you're messing around with Materia and a bunch of interesting areas to explore. Fast forward enough and every fucking game starts with hours and hours of cutscenes, tutorials forever on the barest bones mechanics which you only fully unlock 5 steps away from the final boss, etc.

The games at their fullest potential may even be, as you said, better than what came before and full of complexities not present in more "primitive" titles. But it's no fun GETTING to that point... so devs started adding New Game+ so you could play the game in an actually fun way the second time around. Just, why?

Who the hell thought anyone wanted shit to be like this?

[Anonymous No.10700805]

>>10699686
>youtube tranny posts custom OoT map with steampunk elements that look like shit
>>I have reached Retro Gaming Nirvana

[Anonymous No.10700815]

>>10700792
>There's a brief, impressive FMV that has you gripped before you're dropped right into a big mission and the game keeps rolling at a snappy pace with the cutscenes all being interesting yet short enough to tell a gripping story while you're messing around with Materia and a bunch of interesting areas to explore.
I seriously wonder why more games can't just start in medias res. I can see why FF7 must have been such a mind blowing release at the time. Seems like so many NES and SNES rpgs started with scrolling Star Wars text.

[Anonymous No.10700843]

>>10700815
>Seems like so many NES and SNES rpgs started with scrolling Star Wars text.
Saying that is misleading even, given how Star Wars begins. A New Hope blew people away because it gets right into the action and has you intrigued from the start. It does eventually slow down and begin the narrative more traditionally further into the film, but that's AFTER the audience has been invested and needs a moment to breathe after all the action and fantastical sights anyways. And then it excitedly throws the audience right back into suspenseful space action all the way until the end.

The flawed idea that every fucking game, not even just RPGs, needs to start with some slow crawl where the player is slow and powerless while being fed exposition and tutorials endlessly is the god damned worst. Almost every truly good game throws you into the deep end with just enough information to get you going. The fun will keep you there.

[Anonymous No.10700913]

>>10698479
>But where's the actual discussion about the games?
too many games
there's only even 1 game in the entire library that reached over 10% of the install base (GTA san andreas)

[Anonymous No.10701046]

>>10698740
>>10699482
>>10700701
>>10700792
so this is what seething over a piece of plastic for more than twenty years looks like

[Anonymous No.10701159]

>>10698706
>I'd build another San Andreas for the PS2 in a nanosecond. The problem is we don't have the technology to do that anymore. We used to, but we destroyed that technology, and it's a painful process to build it back again.

[Anonymous No.10703510]

>>10700913
then /vr/ should be flooded with PS2 threads that get 2 or 3 replies

[Anonymous No.10703535]

>>10700175
ffxii international zodiac job version never even released on the ps2 outside of japan and didn't do so well over there... zodiac age is also quite a bit nerfed and casual in comparison because you get two classes per character instead of only one which makes you op desu

[Anonymous No.10703565]

>>10703510
the real reason is because the ps2 marked the beginning of modernslop and is barely half retro in design so people here hate a lot of the games on it. cube has some hipster appeal but xbox is the exact same way

[Anonymous No.10703662]

>>10701046
Gagging on cope too hard to formulate a real reply? Anon gave you a lot to work with, little of which need be taken at face value.

>>10700843
Storytelling has always been an art, but not often enough treated as such by certain devs to the point where a professional approach is taken. No console, genres or generation has been immune to this imo.

Putting the pieces of this thread together (apology this probably wasn't one anon) seems there's a case for the PS2 being specifically problematic less so with devs misunderstanding good storytelling technique (like more fmv =more better) but more so because solving technical difficulties had to necessarily take priority and lazy storytelling being the by product.

So were there any early PS2 games that managed to overcome technical challenges early in the PS2 life, particularly ones made by smaller teams, that could still showcase the technology? What does /vr think?

[Anonymous No.10703672]

>>10703662
>Anon gave you a lot to work with
walls of text of someone seething at a console and its library and trying to gaslight othersshouldn't be taken seriously

[Anonymous No.10703697]

>>10703672
Ok you really read it as that. I read other anon as seriously trying to make a case. I would have initially taken you more seriously if your earlier post made this clearer. Thanks for the reply.

[Anonymous No.10703698]

*clearer > the gaslighting bit

[Anonymous No.10703702]

>>10703697
no thank you for still crying about cinematics

[Anonymous No.10703717]

>>10703702
>no thank you for still crying about cinematics
Ok now I just think you find reading challenging in general. When did I do that?

[Anonymous No.10704868]

>>10703672
>walls of text of someone seething at a console

Dude if you actually read what I wrote you'd see I'm praising the games I do admire on there, to the point that I'm quite happy to say that the best PS2 RPGs are better than anything in the genre on the PS1. I don't hate the console, but I do think it's largely much more mediocre than it's reputation would suggest, and in particular compared to how exceptionally amazing and innovative games were in the generation just prior. Like, it has a lot of likable games, but it was just rarer to jump into something and find that it was giving you an exceptional experience unlike anything before or that at least flat out improves on something prior substantially and with only minor downsides at worst. Like, you can include multiplats, and see that while Timesplitters 2 is pretty good and really worth playing on it, I can't really say it's better than Goldeneye or Halo or that the PS2 version is the best way to play it.

It's a solid console compared to many others that actually offers a lot, I don't want to deny that, but there just isn't much there that's going to really blow your mind or which endures exceptionally well and lacks a sequel which surpasses it, so you largely aren't going to get the kinds of hyper specific sperg nostalgia you find for Nintendo consoles directed at it.

[Anonymous No.10704964]

>>10698164
because multi core parallel processing is hard and no games were made that relied on it until then.

[Anonymous No.10706598]

>>10699380

[Anonymous No.10706838]

>>10699482
>When it's Sega, it's all about console revisionism
specific examples?

[Anonymous No.10706871]

>>10706838
We had like 3 or 4 threads this past week alone about how the Saturn or Dreamcast could have been saved somehow.

[Anonymous No.10706876]

>>10706871
Those are made by Nintendo fans.

[Anonymous No.10706886]

>>10706871
Weren’t those threads specifically “what if” scenarios for the sake of discussion?

[Anonymous No.10706979]

>>10700043
That's literally a quote from some redditor who claimed to have developed for PS2. You know this is a lie as everyone on reddit is a LARPing liar and they are all desperate for "karma" and "upvotes"

[Anonymous No.10707086]

>>10698740
>It has basically no actually all-time-great level exclusives.
Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix is elder god-tier and has a hardcore scene to this day
You're just a clueless casual
It's embarrassing that you list garbage like Dark Cloud and MGS as good games

Then there is
Ico
DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 2(the most innovative fighting game since Street Fighter 2) and 3
Silent Hill 2/3/4
FFXII
Xenosaga 1, 2 and 3
Persona 3 and 4
SMT 3 Nocturne
Onimusha trilogy

And it's funny you mention innovation but forget to mention GTA 3 and Vice City and San Andreas.

So to summarize:
You need to do less talking and more playing the PS2.

[Anonymous No.10707095]

>>10698714
Burnout 3 is GOAT status and is Renderware's best game

[Anonymous No.10707101]

>>10707086
>Ico
>Silent Hill 2/3/4
>FFXII
>Xenosaga 1, 2 and 3
>Persona 3 and 4
>Onimusha trilogy
All of these have bad gameplay and or too much story.

[Anonymous No.10707256]

>>10707101
You didn't play any of them
Ico doesn't have that much story to it, it's mostly a puzzle game with some atmosphere

[Anonymous No.10707284]

>>10698706
not really surprising. you indeed are not going to have artists who are experts in the specific lo fi pastiche that suited 6th gen capabilities.

[Anonymous No.10707305]

>>10707086
>Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix
Was a Japanese exclusive released in 2007, and which most westerners wouldn't get to play properly until the mid 2010s, instead only getting to play the mediocre original version. Like, I guess I could let you count this, but the fact that the console's best action game wouldn't have been accessible for basically the entire lifetime of the system it was originally released on is kind of part of my point here. KH1 is a far better 'base' game anyway, but that's still very flawed in similar ways to the other classic titles I mentioned and likewise full of obnoxiousness. Dark Chronicle follows the same pattern of " really great game in principle that just turns out to be tedious and repetitive".

>3D GTA
Both not an exclusive for very long, and something I was always disappointed by the gimmicky nature of its format. The idea of a fully real time city spanning 3D sandbox where you can steal cars and do whatever you want but have to escape the law is super cool, but you quickly realize how little there is to really do in 'sandbox mode' that matters and carries over to other things and how the bulk of progress depends on the game switching to 'mission mode', which lets you really do meaningful things but is largely divorced from how the game operates outside of that and is much more restrictive with regards to what actually going on in the world, and then you're mainly confronted with how janky its mechanics are. There's a big difference between this and, say, Zelda, where you really can discover arbitrarily important things "out in the world".

[Anonymous No.10709000]

It's 2000 PS1's on a single chip. Of course it's going to be difficult to work with.

[Anonymous No.10709109]

>>10707095
Agreed because the game was made by Critereon themselves (the creators of the renderware engine) it used custom effects that others using the engine never did. the PS2 version actually looks and plays better than the Xbox version despite Xbox apparently being the more powerful system.

[Anonymous No.10709169]

I like a lot of the SRPGs, front mission kessen dynasty tactics disgaea ring of red, I think those still hold up if you like that

[Anonymous No.10709187]

>>10698934
>It's the first modern slopmachine.
>HOLY HECKIN SCIENCE POPULAR MACHINE ATTRACTS SHIT TIER DEVS JUST MAKING A QUICK BUCK OMS I AM GOING INSANE
Anyone who complains about a popular console having too much slop is a diagnosed niggertard who doesn't understand how markets work.