What's a game you don't play for a stupid reason?

[mjr4077au]

Ahh right I completely misinterpreted what you said! I thought you meant it didn't impact your desktop. The DPI change is in hardware and I'm not sure the OS has any real knowledge of the mouse's resolution, only the polling rate. That's all I can put that down to.

[Rachael]

I think the point dpJudas is trying to make is that the OS should be DPI-aware for the mouse and adjust the mouse's speed inside the OS (and games) accordingly. I don't think whoever designed the mouse communication protocol anticipated that need, though - however, it's not like something special can't be written on both the software and hardware ends to deal with that. (It wouldn't be the first time a peripheral used a custom driver, after all... which if we're lucky will be standardized and written directly into the OS anyhow)

That being said - if such a mechanism was in place, there would be no need whatsoever for a DPI switch - if it can transparently handle a 2000 DPI mouse and move its cursor across the screen at the same rate as a 800 DPI one - why would you ever need to lower its DPI?

[Kinsie]

One day, we as a species will advance enough to the point where Requiem: Avenging Angel can be played in a window without the mouse cursor escaping at the slightest opportunity.

One day.

[Enjay]

Ah Requiem:AA. I got quite a kick out of that game. I mean, it's flawed - very in places - but I did enjoy it. I really liked the visuals: not so much the hellish stuff (standard game blood and guts hell - though quite inventively presented) but I really liked the design of some of the "real world" stuff. I thought that the guards/future cops (or whatever) had a really good look to them.

The combination of weaponry and angelic abilities was done nicely too I thought.

[Redneckerz]

Ah Requiem:AA. I got quite a kick out of that game. I mean, it's flawed - very in places - but I did enjoy it. I really liked the visuals: not so much the hellish stuff (standard game blood and guts hell - though quite inventively presented) but I really liked the design of some of the "real world" stuff. I thought that the guards/future cops (or whatever) had a really good look to them.
The combination of weaponry and angelic abilities was done nicely too I thought.

They really nailed doing an attempt at realistic shadows in an era where blob shadows were common enough. Quake 3 ofcourse went the full monty, but Requiem and Kingpin: Life of Crime did a good job getting stencil like shadows going on. It still looks good even today.

[leileilol]

Texture shadows were rather inefficient for the time with most video cards having slow memory bandwidth for texture uploads however (especially "godly" "futureproof" 3dfx Voodoo2 SLI setups where this is double worse - don't buy the inflated benchmark BS from retro youtubers), and the technique isn't exactly new either - Terminal Velocity had this!

Quake3's "full monty" of shadows is a really buggy stencil shadow implementation that's not much better than the hack that was in GLQuake. Even that attempt at volumetric shadows, because doing it off averaged lightgrid directions just makes the shadow inconsistent and jump everywhere. There's no texture shadows because id Tech 3 was designed to avoid bandwidth stalls (hence no lightmap updates from dynamic lights).. You can feel Carmack's frustration in there being channeled to some other game that's probably an obligatory for this thread....

If you want to see super shadow tech in 1999, you'll probably want to play Nocturne (another good game for this thread), or check out the Seed demo (game never finished, dev cycle was so long it was originally a "Quake killer").

[Redneckerz]

Texture shadows were rather inefficient for the time with most video cards having slow memory bandwidth for texture uploads however (especially "godly" "futureproof" 3dfx Voodoo2 SLI setups where this is double worse - don't buy the inflated benchmark BS from retro youtubers), and the technique isn't exactly new either - Terminal Velocity had this!

Ah yes, Terminal Velocity - A childhood favorite. The ending credits music (Presented as a animation) was so incredibly memorable for me, helped ofcourse with the nostalgic low quality of the orchestral samples back then. But yes - TV had these things, albeit subtle - It was a great indicator of when enemies flew by without actually seeing them.

Quake3's "full monty" of shadows is a really buggy stencil shadow implementation that's not much better than the hack that was in GLQuake. Even that attempt at volumetric shadows, because doing it off averaged lightgrid directions just makes the shadow inconsistent and jump everywhere. There's no texture shadows because id Tech 3 was designed to avoid bandwidth stalls (hence no lightmap updates from dynamic lights).. You can feel Carmack's frustration in there being channeled to some other game that's probably an obligatory for this thread....

I am aware of Quake 3's glitchy attempts at (And even more so in Elite Force) and Quake 2's shadowcaster (Which was disabled by default) but GLQuake attempted stencils aswell? That's news to me. Is there any additional information available regarding this?

I can imagine that at time of release, turning that one would have had a detrimental effect on both looks but also performance.
Sub question: The specialized VQuake build did not had support for these?

If you want to see super shadow tech in 1999, you'll probably want to play Nocturne (another good game for this thread), or check out the Seed demo (game never finished, dev cycle was so long it was originally a "Quake killer").

Good ones (Nocturne) but especially Seed. Eventually a year or so ago i had the demo running and was mighly impressed by what i saw - Not only on the wide variety of GPU support, but also the combination of these shadows with the colored lights and particles. Its still one of the most impressive 90s titles on a visual scale because of it, and because it pulled all of this off on pre-shader hardware.

Sadly it never got finished. Another contender for this (Doing fancy Doom3 effects years before Doom3) would be Severance: Blade of Darkness, but that's a 2001 title. To my slight surprise i found a mint copy at a flea market last year so i could see the thing in action on my ancient rig. And it looks amazing aswell. Seed pushes more effects but is unfinished, but its so satisying throwing a flare in Severance and seeing the environment realisticaly react to it with shadows.

Severance had a lot more going aswell - water reflections and ripples, and a rather convincing physics system that would not look out of place in HL2. Objects actually have weight and don't just clip through geometry, but are stopped, for instance when a sword hits a wall.

The only real downsize to the game are its low textures (256x256) especially when two years a similar looking title (Enclave) looked so much better with high resolution textures. As a result Enclave also still holds up rather brilliant these days. But Severance is special, for it achieves all these effects on mere Voodoo's Matrox G200's and ATI Rage's, much like how Seed supported those. A brilliant tech showcase that sadly got, no pun intended, overshadowed by more known titles years later.

[Kinsie]

Here's something neat/blasphemous: Aerofoil, a native Windows port of the pre-OSX Mac classic Glider Pro. It even has the level editor and built-in StuffIt and Compact Pro extractors for playing old custom levels!

[Phate6660]

- DOOM (2016) and everything after it. I can't help but compare them to the original games and get angry. They feel like stupid generic FPS games.
- Prey (2017). This one angers me even more than the newer DOOM games. I HATE that they took the name of the original, only to have nothing to do with it.
- Elder Scrolls Online. TES: World of Warcraft Edition. Enough said.

[kinker31]

Doom Eternal's kind of an interesting relationship for me, for the longest time, it just seemed like to big of a jump past Classic Doom and even 2016 for it to really seem interesting, then I saw some gameplay livestreams and I was like "Hey, this actually ain't bad, I wanna try it now!", a couple weeks later... turns out my PC was (and still is) too much of a potato to even run it on the lowest settings. So a refund for Eternal had to be made, but hey, I got the refund!

[Matt]

I still haven't played Life Is Strange 2 because I still haven't installed the new video card I got because I don't have an adapter that could fit it to my monitor because I don't feel like wasting that kind of money on shipping and handling from Newegg for one measly little adapter

because I totaled my car driving home with the new video card back in July and at some point I need to spend hella cash on a new one

[Yeetee]

Commander Keen because MS-dos S U C K S

[Xim]

Oh I got one or more, I've never been able to get into any Command and Conquer game after Red Alert 2. I feel like once they went full 3d they lost some kind of charm they had, the games felt too different. Generals, RA3 and Tiberium Wars are all decent games, I just can't seem to get into them. CnC 4, however was so bad it killed the franchise until the classic remaster came out, so that why I haven't play that one.

[Project Shadowcat]

Oh I got one or more, I've never been able to get into any Command and Conquer game after Red Alert 2. I feel like once they went full 3d they lost some kind of charm they had, the games felt too different. Generals, RA3 and Tiberium Wars are all decent games, I just can't seem to get into them. CnC 4, however was so bad it killed the franchise until the classic remaster came out, so that why I haven't play that one.

It's generally agreed upon that C&C4 just crapped all over the C&C formula and games so badly that no one even wants to acknowledge its existence.
Red Alert 3 is too campy for my tastes and I couldn't get into it while it was in Beta. Too much micromanagement and I didn't like how the ore fields were set up all ready to go like that.
TIberium Wars was interesting. Its story was also a bit on the campy side, missions were... sure, fine, but I never played a more balanced C&C game online. It was a ton of fun to play with friends.
Generals feels like it's another one of those "bad C&C games" but if they left the C&C name out, it could've done okay. Without its expansion Zero Hour, Generals felt really incomplete.

[abbuw]

I am completely unable to get into System Shock 2 because the animations for the weapons and the enemies feel absurdly slow, like I'm tapping someone in the face with a wrench instead of bashing someone in the face with a wrench. Didn't have this problem in Thief or the original System Shock though.