We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

see also: the man who has built his entire portfolio out of flavor text (warning: games may be preachy)

Is there a word for the non-anti-aliased blocky low-res textures in games like the Saturn port of House of the Dead, Mega Man Legends, Minecraft etc?

Low poly?

I don’t know whether there’s a word for that, but prominent aliasing has often been called “jaggies” in graphics-speak.

Regardless, while low poly isn’t quite the right term because it refers to geometry, that IS how you would find more (there is a neat thread on Polycount).

I have a set of better fansubs if you want supes

As I understand it (poorly), texture fidelity is largely an issue of system memory, which is why the Saturn port of The House Of The Dead looks so ridiculously crap compared to the arcade release. Choosing to use an anti-aliasing filter on textures appears to be a stylistic choice, especially when they are low res. That is, someone makes the decision for their textures to look "blurry" instead of "blocky" as a necessary artistic compromise.

Well, it depends on what you need out of “fidelity”.
- Texture dimensions. Larger textures (uncompressed) take up more memory, and handling a larger texture also involves more processing (not necessarily too much more depending on what you do with it, but it does) of the texels—“texture elements” (texture pixels).
- Texture appearance is a function of many things. The blurriness is one of a number of texture filtering techniques that can be chosen among (or not). Although filtering is technically a form of anti-aliasing, calling it such in a graphics discussion is liable to confuse people, because usually by that people are thinking of the concern of pixels on the display device in relation to geometry, not textures (and it can be much more computationally expensive than simple texture filtering).

The following is a grab bag of texture filtering-related terms:
- Nearest-neighbor interpolation plays a big part in kind of look you are thinking of. It is fairly simple in terms of implementation, but it results in a lot of issues in motion unless you make details so low-res it doesn’t matter. So somewhere between the motion issues and the cost of memory at the time, they made a lot of low-res textures. Me, I did not like this look as a kid but that’s really just the games I was exposed to. It’s the wrong look for realism, and you can see it in so many PlayStation games trying to do just that. It does work much better when it’s used more like a 3D kind of pixel art (maybe it should be called texel art?).
- Bilinear and trilinear filtering blurs between texels so that you don’t have a very obvious grid running across your geometry on close inspection.
- The above three filtering methods are, on a single texture application, mutually exclusive. In theory, you certainly can use more than one within a scene, but I’m have no idea whether that’s practical on real hardware, and it certainly violates normal senses of aesthetics.
- Mipmapping is the art of using smaller textures for something further away and the visual purpose that it serves is making sure things don’t look funky by picking unrepresentative texels, even blurred ones, from far away (there are other purposes this accomplishes but they are not relevant to the discussion). It is common to use with any of the above forms of filtering, otherwise you would have nasty artifacts.
- Anisotropic filtering is not the same kind of filtering as the kind of point sampling you use; rather it is more akin to mipmapping. The difference is that anisotropic filtering is more about adjusting to extreme angles so that faraway walls and floors do not feature those aforementioned nasty artifacts.

Anyway, if your hardware is not fast enough to do most the above practically (and neither the PSX nor the Saturn is), you might stretch out the texture to avoid these artifacts as much as possible (as well as save memory). One of the worst ones is definitely shimmering; when you have a faraway thing that keeps blinking in and out of existence depending on whether it happens to be in line with a pixel on the camera, it’s very distracting. Yet Another Reason™ for all that fog in early 3D games.

(and those subs are glorious I mean wow )

Actually I don't think Gaist Crusher's a tie in, so much as it is just...a shonen game. With a Skylanders collectible toys gimmick. The character designs are pretty much straight outta Mega Man Star Force, really! Still, I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the game. It does kinda remind me of Wonderful 101 though, if only because it's a sentai-themed beatemup.

Also dang, I had forgotten about that lowpoly thread. Well, there goes the rest of my afternoon.

(Also GraphicsTalk is really interesting, but I have nothing to add to it)

Actually I don't think Gaist Crusher's a tie in, so much as it is just...a shonen game. With a Skylanders collectible toys gimmick. The character designs are pretty much straight outta Mega Man Star Force, really! Still, I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the game. It does kinda remind me of Wonderful 101 though, if only because it's a sentai-themed beatemup.

Also dang, I had forgotten about that lowpoly thread. Well, there goes the rest of my afternoon.

(Also GraphicsTalk is really interesting, but I have nothing to add to it)

The character designs might as well just be Star Force, that sword they were showing off was almost identical to Thunder Zerker from SF2, but in red

I felt that calling the designs 'straight out of Star Force's rubbish bin' was too strong, yeah.

> they’re seriously gonna spell it Gaist

*twitch*

That game looks neat as fuck.

I don't have much of an opinion about rail shooter games as i haven't played many, i like 'em light guns, but i don't think i'd consider buying one.

Definitely agree about the Wii though, a huge missed opportunity.

personally not that big a fan of light gun games, but the wii had a ton of potential for such things. it even had a periphereal for it.

ohwell

Time Crisis was so cool when I was a kid. Nice big cabinet, really grokkable gimmick. I don’t care for cover shooters, but this was a cover RAIL shooter so nyehhh

(Wild Dog must have spent time in the House of the Dead, he’s gotta be a living corpse by now.)

I could pay much more for the HotD:Overkill Hand Cannon, but it hardly seems worth it for ... two games. I would love to attempt to use it in Trauma Center though just for giggles. HEALING TOUCH.

Anyvay, zat's how I lost my medical license!

I once got so good at Time Crisis 2 that I could get to the last level on 2 credits. I even got a bit of a crowd going while doing it!
Funnily enough, you get a crap ton less accurate when a bunch of strangers are right behind your back watching your every move.

That little 'deet-deet-ACTION' will be forever ingrained into my head.

Most of what was around when I was a kid was HotD2 and Point Blank. Time Cris...es are well made games, I just can't get very invested in the generic action movie presentation nowadays.

For me, the ones that were almost everywhere were Lethal Enforcers and Area 51. They also usually had one of either Revolution X or Terminator 2. (Most of the arcades I went to were on military bases; that probably influenced the selection to be less commercially risky than most.)

Most light gun cabs I’ve seen in the past decade have been unplayably broken, despite that they’re contributing to the electric bill all day. Who do these ops think they’re fooling? Ugh.

most things like the stomp for cover pedal and the spaced screens were to prevent people from just taking the gun, bringing it up to the screen, and literally shoot things point blank

SpoilerShow

video=youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WZhxSFGRBQ[/video]

Woah, I played this ages ago at a cousin's house and I remember being really impressed by it as a kid. Wasn't expecting to ever see it again, since none of my friends back home had a Super Scope haha. Still like the graphics and mech designs a lot.

have not been referenced or exploited in Smash Bros

You have to track your opponent from left to right and counter their shots. Weak shots destroy certain incoming projectiles, while charged shots interrupt attacks. I would imagine it would also make it difficult on harder fights to find an opportunity to get any hits in.

This seems strikingly similar to how the Super Scope is handled as an item in Smash Bros. It can fire a stream of small shots to disrupt your opponent, or charge to several level to blast your opponent off the stage. I feel like this item is at least an indirect reference to their earlier games.

In Divekick news, Kick's death cries include "AAAaaaugh!", "DAAAaaaamn!", "BIIIiiiitch!", "SEVEN POuuuunds!", and "THE SECRET LIFE OF BEEEeeeeeees!"

There's only so much entertainment you can get out of people talking over videogames.

Jon leaving the show actually made me kind of respect him, instead of milking the already established but decaying channel he goes away to continue working on his thing 'cause LP's are slightly worse than the thing he does.

Why is it so irritating to watch someone suck at a game you're good at.

I dunno my friend is streaming Mass Effect and it still hasn't gotten old watching her fail miserably at the frogger hacking minigame.

I in particular just get annoyed when I watch somebody try to solve a puzzle I know the answer to.

"No you god damn idiot the solution is so obvious how are you not figuring this out!?"

Antichamber is the exception if you can really call it a puzzle game. I always find it super interesting to watch like, the first hour of people playing, because everybody seems to tackle it in completely different ways.

Hee hee. Antichamber's always really fun to inflict on people. That first hour is pretty much just watching their face process the mindfuckery they're experiencing.

In other news I got bored

I wanted that one when it was on sale, but mac ;-;

(antichamber that is)

Can anyone explain what is going on with this?