That's hilarious. Both, the fact and the joke.

So true

yea

Context?

​​@@diegovargasdiego Mass Effect Andromeda is infamous for its very static facial animations, very unmoving, while Gman had his expressions carefully constructed. Even today, games like starfield, have facial expressions worse than oblivion.

Yep and for this reason, my brothers and I were able to create our own environments in Duke 3D editor, with their own atmosphere, even though we were just kids and teenagers at the time - something that hasn't really been possible since, even with Minecraft.

Indie games exist.

A trend I noticed in the Quake 1 mapping scene is that several modern maps or map packs were made by people with senior design roles at major studios. As if there's something there in terms of expression and creativity in the level design that keeps them coming back in their free time in spite of their day jobs working on much more advanced high profile games.

It’s still that golden era in the indie game world

@@MaxOakland I agree, that's where all the fun stuff is still happening

Exactly, that’s why I love these so much They feel so genuine

Agreed. Criminally undersubbed

I don't think there is enough talk about readability sometimes. I remember when I tried Dota 2, I was impressed by the graphics from gameplay videos, but when I actually played it, the high detail graphics made it so hard for me to process everything. I completely miss how the enemy hero was right next to me and I was dead by the time I noticed him. I don't know if it's any better today, this was nearly 10 years ago, but I stop playing Dota 2 after a day or two of trying. It was too visually overwhelming to me.

good example of this is mirrors edge(2007). 1) is conpletely fucking perfect on it and 2) the game isn't ugly, it has Its own art style that won't ever look ugly, even though It's 16 years lld

​@@KayleLangLOL I did not know about MK1 on the switch, that is horrendous!

There is a pretty good example of readability, or the lack thereof, in this video: that Pong remake at 1:20. It features lanes and bumpers that appear to do nothing, existing merely for aesthetic flavor. Even though I know it's fake, my brain keeps processing it as if it's a pinball board, with pinball board expectations. I'd get used to it eventually, but that's the opposite of what should be happening. The black and white original is an upgrade in the graphical design department because it conveys more relevant information.

@@dycedargselderbrother5353 - another example from the video, sad to say, is Aladdin on the Genesis. The cartoon animation is done really well, and Dave Perry and his team really were masters of that style of Genesis platform game, but all the same it does represent the era when character hitboxes became very hard to read, and a degree of precision was lost.

There's a similar concept in psychology called 'closure', which refers to the way humans are very good at filling in the gaps in fragmented or partial visual stimuli, particularly with things like patterns or sequential images. It's what makes it possible for us to read a comic and understand something like an action scene presented in that format.

L. N. Tolstoy would agree with you on the tree part.

Less realistic and detailed graphics tend to have great usage of color theory, which makes them really pleasant to look at, and helps you get immersed. Realistic graphics are supposed to make you feel immersed, but often they just do the opposite, because they fail at color theory, which makes them not pleasant enough to look at to immerse you, but also not realistic enough to immerse you.

Super agreed. I'm personally am against drawing from reference image/photo because of this. If I weren't seeing things with my own eyes I can't express my experience in art because I have no experience.

Your imagination will always be higher fidelity than any computer!

Not so much immersion, but functionality. Elite from 1984 works, and Ultima Underworld from 1992 does not, because the latter fills two thirds of the screen with an unnecesseary grey HUD.

I figured it'd be a fairly harmless joke within 6-7 character, but I do realize it may come off as purely icky. If that's how you felt upon decoding the joke, I can't fault you for that. apologies.

@@GSTChannelVEVO Oh no no not at all, I was laughing! I'm sorry I came off as being icky about this. What I meant is once I started seeing where the board was going, 100% of my concentration went towards seeing if you were, in fact, spelling out "SEND NUDES" :-D

@@ennexthefox oh, whoops! I get so many negative comments that I initially parsed yours with that tone. this reading is much nicer. very happy to see my joke land

@@GSTChannelVEVO As much as I like to think I have a sophisticated sense of humor, dumb stuff like this will always make me laugh! Sorry I again I caused you stress - I don't get why anyone would send negative comments at you, but I also know how much they can hurt.

@@ennexthefox lol, same. hence the inclusion in the first place. :P and yeah don't worry about me! I'm usually pretty unassailable. I understand most negative comments as people that are just outside of my target audience, so to speak. But if the comment is "your thoughtless action caused me harm" then that *will* get to me. seeing how this case wasn't that, all is well, I think.

I like games that are simple enough for me to digest. A game that I can easily understand helps me to immerse myself in the game world and lore. I learned that grinding takes away the fun and time, so I avoid overly long games. I also like games that give me multiple options. Depending on the gameplay, I may be overwhelmed at first but as I got invested in the gameplay mechanics, I might be able to master them quickly. Fallout New Vegas was my first experience with freedom of options in a game and it's still one of the best games I've ever played. The graphics are objectively outdated (with a strong orange filter), but the characters and writing and the gameplay are what make the game great. Even if it's a long game, it isn't grindy or require too much time to level up.

yeah every hype man inflates the utility of their tech and energetically paints a picture of the amazing future it offers and the new connections with people it's going to form. His enthusiasm isn't unique, it's very commercial, and it felt like that example was picked just to be contrarian I dunno I feel like mundane things like more robust stories and game mechanics will probably draw deeper connections with people and we don't have to wait for Molyneux or whoever else to design a psuedo carnival trick that fools someone into reacting. Like, a cheaply made horror game can trick me into jumping in my seat with a jumpscare. That isn't a meaningful connection though. I connect more with SH2 because of its story and design

It may be from my ignorance, but my read on the guy is that he's someone who will get hyped about some WIP concept he's working with, fully believe it, and then hold press conferences talking about it as if the final product is 100% guaranteed to match his vision, when he should know better than to announce his chickens before the hatch. ultimately, that's a lie, but I don't believe it's intended to be conniving or malicious. having said all that, I don't think I can really argue against your perspective here. Despite literally describing "never trust Molyneux" as "a bit harsh" in my video... I think it's a good mantra to follow, lol.

@@GSTChannelVEVO To my knowledge about project Milo, it's perhaps the least awful lie that he told. Mainly because he did actually have a team working on it, but it was never greenlit by his publisher (Microsoft in this case.) So it was a premature announcement before he even had the right to say it was going to happen.

@@GSTChannelVEVO The man has made some good games and I have a hard time believing that can be done with zero passion, but during his BAFTA speech he apologized to his team for making up features to "stop journalists from going to sleep", which to me reads less like believing his original vision will arrive fully intact, and more like making features up on the spot to keep the hype train going. And regardless of intention there, video games are a group effort because they're really hard to make. If no one on your team has ever heard of "trees that grow in realtime" or "grass that remembers every blade you cut", or what have you prior to a random interview, particularly if you are close to release I don't think there's really any reasonable way to believe those features will actually make it into the game. If it was a mistake made once and learned from I'd be more understanding, but it's a pattern of behaviour spanning many years and many projects. Additionally specific to the project Milo thing, the entire point of a tech demo is to show people that the technology is real and is working now. When Nvidia puts out a cool tesselation tech demo or what have you, it's running on an actual card and you can expect that technology to reach games in a few months to years depending on how difficult it is to implement. If you have to hire an actress to pretend to catch a pair of goggles and then claim "everyone does that" for a technology that does not exist and will never materialize from the platform you are saying it's already working on, you are very intentionally misleading people about what to expect and I don't have much to say other than "Don't do that it's obviously really unethical." I hope I haven't come off as hostile, and I appreciate you taking the time to read and reply to my comment, but have serious bones to pick with that man.

don't worry, you haven't come off as hostile at all! I realize that a lot of people have plenty of bones to pick with Molyneux, and for good reasons. I have a bit more sympathy towards him (even if it may be misplaced) but I also don't think he's "innocent", I guess? I brought up Project Milo because it's a funny piece of gaming history. an infamous lie. but on the surface, the clip has several elements that linked back to my broader thesis. I really like how they tried so hard to convey how immersive the game (er..."game") is by pantomiming that goggle catch. Maybe "why did they shoot the video like this" would've been a better framing...

it's really tempting to make that its own video. even if it's not intentional, the way that hands become symbolic is fascinating!

It's not just computer graphics, either. Hands are, by far, the part of the human body that artists complain about drawing the most! One of the reasons that there are so many historical sketches of hands is not just the symbolism; it's that they are very difficult to get right, and you practice what's difficult to get better at it.

I think a big part of it is they are something that we see so incredibly frequently so we really easily pick up on when something's wrong. Like, it's not often that we study the exact shape of blades of grass, or the texture of bark on a tree, but we all look at our hands constantly as we do things with them.

I mean, it's still mostly about the music! Even with my narrated videos: of the 7 WIP scripts I have open rn, 5 of them are more about music than games. I've just become more comfortable with my own voice (metaphorically and literally), and people seem to respond to that! It's been lovely.

It's why the horse balls in Red Dead Redemption 2 were joked about so much. What does it add to the gameplay? To the immersion? To the experience? (I'm not talking about the entire game here. But that tiny thing they added ended up hurting more than it helps, even ever so slightly)

@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 How does it hurt more than it helps? I doubt it did any real harm. I haven't played the game, but after watching many videos showing the details the developers put in, I found them quite nice and enjoyable. They add to the immersion (especially the railway workers *actually* putting nails down onto the track). I got your point, but the example of horse balls seems nitpicky to me. (Wow, I spent my time writing a paragraph about horse balls in a game I never played.)

@@s3rs312Basically it is about the time/value of small details in a video game. Personally the game isn’t more fun to me knowing that somebody probably spend 2-3 hours modeling the horse testicles. Those 2-3 hours of dev time add up and in my opinion would be better suited towards not making every gunfight feel exactly the same. The focus of the realism vs good gameplay relative to the horse balls is lopsided (pun intended).

@@s3rs312 It adds nothing good, but it does take away some space on your disk and decrease performance. That's kind of how I feel about all realism in video games. And realistic graphics also make it harder to focus on actual gameplay elements. I'd actually rather play the same game with less realism than with more realism.

@@vinsplayer2634 It depends on the degree of realism you go with, I guess? But how much until it becomes too realistic? Take bullet holes that appears when you shoot a wall in FPS, for example. Does that qualify as "distracting graphics" or "nice immersion"? I disagree that realistic graphic distract you from game elements; I think the problem lies in game design. A lot of low-effort game created using Unreal Engine has real-as-shit textures, but everything still looks like shit and blurry due to the design of the game elements. However, another game made with older engine does not have as good textures, but every game elements combine beautifully to make it look more real than the other game, and easy to play as well.

Example: Whether we play Virtua Racing or Forza, as soon as we're given an actual wheel to play them, we feel completely transported into the game.

For me a better explanation is that we crave agency, and that's the unique thing that games provide that neither music, movies or literature (or indeed tragically even our IRL lives) do.

video games are amazing ^^

@@Bestmann3n yeah that's a much better way of putting it. I honestly can't care about immersion when i don't know where i'm supposed to be going be it IRL or in a game. To me, tuning out is a much more fundamental human experience than "immersion" and people who keep insisting that "immersion" is what makes or breaks a story are deliberately ignoring people who read books. You tune out your surroundings first and THEN immerse, if you want to. I can't claim to have been fully immersed in anything as much as focused on something and avoidant/ignorant of my surroundings. The reasons for tuning out can be many but a big one, as you said, is craving agency.

@@scytheslash I mean, I think for some people tuning out their surroundings and being completely focused on something IS being immersed, and you just have a different understand of the word/terminology than others might?

Honestly, I think it's the writing. The combination of traditional storytelling with dramatic scripted sequences build a world that feels fun and cohesive. The crowbar remains an all time greatest ever weapons and monsters are really scary! It tells alot of tory with the in game levels and scenery, dialogue and sound design. It comes together to make a pacey linear story. With solid shooting mechanics.

@@iwanttocomplaintrue

Also about the zombie scientists being scary, I think that low-fidelity graphics work especially well with horror, because when anything is low-fidelity, your imagination fills in the gaps. And with horror, your imagination will always be scarier than any monster constructed from tiny pixels on a 2D screen.

I wouldn't call them innovating, maybe in N64 era but past them i'll just call them consistent

It definately can have, some of the homebrew there looks as good as some nes games

Nah, pong consoles definitely takes the cake

@@ark8705 false pong consoles while having beautiful graphics are also all the same the atari 2600 is able to produce the beautiful graphics of pong while add more i mean look at pitfall

i still think it's funny to "force" people to listen to my music like this, but I've gotten so many kind comments about it! :P

​@@GSTChannelVEVO have you posted any of your music? I'd love to listen to it more, especially that last song

​@@ryanmartin1377 I post my tunes to scibot900 on youtube and soundsfromsci on bandcamp. I'd recommend this video as a sort of sampler: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/abePmcVonqedhpc.html I haven't released that last song anywhere yet, but plan to some time next year (along with everything else I've written for my own videos)!

i feel like that isn't even that hard to create, they already have a model editor and a bunch of textures, hair styles and stuff they use for their own characters, they just give that ability to the player. To me it is a problem when people are angry that a game doesn't look good but also demand more content. Like Halo infinite, people were angry with the trailer that it didn't look good so they remade half the game and then people were confused on why the game launched with no maps and stuff that a 14 year old halo 3 had.

I didn't intend for them to flow into a single sentence, but hey: it almost makes sense! kind of! I'd prolly change the second title to "but it's not about the graphics" if I wanted it to flow better

As a game developer, what excites me about hardware accelerated ray-tracing is the possibility of doing fully dynamic environments and non-static lighting. The world absolutely comes alive when you no longer have to lock everything in place for the light baker to work to hit the visual fidelity style gamer’s demand. But so far, the performance just isn't there to consider building a game around it. So RT continues to be a gimmick in most games.

yeah I completely missed that :( I don't want to re-render and re-upload for 30 seconds of footage, so I've just added a note in the description. sorry about that.

@@GSTChannelVEVO Thanks. Just keep it in mind please. Me and everyone else below the age of 20 would probably like to be able to enjoy the video comfortably and without suffering hearing damage.

I think you have some misconception about age. Everyone can hear that CRT whine

@@xxdarklink93xx fwiw, I'm well above 20 and didn't notice the whine until I listened to the clip at a higher volume. (And I had been editing at a super low volume, since that *usually* helps with balance.)

If I recall correctly, KZfaq compression mutes sounds above 16 kHz. In that case, this would mean that even people in their 20s can hear this sound (assuming it's close to 16 kHz)

it was subconscious, but now that you've named it: yeah! that is exactly the vibe I was channeling!

@@GSTChannelVEVO hahah nice!

Not yet! It is indeed an original composition. I plan to put that (and all the other things I've written for videos) on a PWYW album/compilation some day, I just don't know when...

My issue with VR is that for decades it's been this sort of ideal of this ultimate evolution of what a game can be. Like something games have been working towards the whole time. I don't know if that's really the case. I think the people who are most excited about it want to be in the game. But at this moment, I see VR as a physical impediment to getting into a game. It's uncomfortable. It causes me to sweat profusely into my eyeballs. Often times instead of making me feel like I'm in another reality, it is constantly reminding me that I'm wearing a dumb thing on my head. Meanwhile, I have a Nintendo Switch next to my bed. I can grab it and within moments I am in the world of Witcher 3 (or whatever else I'm playing.) There's barely any barrier between me and the game I am playing. And because of this I can be instantly immersed into the world of the Witcher, meanwhile VR involves me moving furniture around, and strapping things tightly to my face. But when I play a game on my Switch I can so easily lose myself in the world of the game.

You are not wrong, but I've been seeing what each iteration gave me in terms of comfortability and immersion. When we get VR headsets who weigh as glasses (And we are starting to get the first ones), AR games are going to be a game changer. Some games make me feel immersed, like HL Alyx, but I'm more interested in the modern controls, rather than immersion. We will get there on both fronts. Boot up any VR game with good face animations, even Gmod, and you'll perceive characters way differently. AR doesn't require you to move anything. The Meta quest 3 passthrough is sufficient. In 5 years it will be good. Then it will become perfect. VR Will still require you a suitable space, though. So that's my take: VR, full immersion, takes effort, AR, quick game, put on the glasses. @@gswanson

​@@gswansonThe elephant in the room is pretty obvious when you point this out. The prospect of fully immersive VR as a mainstream device is impossible... as long as it costs money. You're going to need an entire room of tech to make it good due to things like body tracking and turning it from goggles to something like Disney's digital soundstage. If you want good VR, you want Holodecks. You want Holodecks? You need the TNG Federation's economic structure. The Federation is communist.

usually i'll hear someone compliment my writing and blush and bashfully say "golly gee" and such, but the "I bet" you've prefaced your sentence with has thrown me off, lol I'm not sure what I'd write beyond humble youtube videos

thank you! I had some similar mistakes in a past script that stayed up for an embarrassingly long time, as everyone was presumably too shy to point them out. :P I've fixed these two!

yeah that's an awkward and silly mistake that I've made before. I'm pretty sure I was reading some reviews from 1999 while I was editing that section, then the date of the reviews slipped in there. oh well, it's not a huge deal I suppose!

Doesn't feel accidental

I think "remix" overstates its relationship to the original track, as I just copied key, tempo, and the percussion... but yeah that's mine! thx!

You okay man?

@@Shellll this video is endless words and im too lazy to listen and dissect what he talks about