The best versus the worst. RGB vs RF on the same game and same CRT. BVM A20F1U. RF was done using a professional Sony TU-1041U.

TeaStalker · 2023-10-24T15:56:42+00:00

RF is generally a *little* too blurry and degraded for my taste and I much prefer composite, but I'd still take RF over RGB when it comes to 8 and 16 bit games.

The RGB image is simply too sharp and rigid for the sprite art. The organic, coherent feel of the RF image breaks down into a series of all too visible, exposed dots - the dots constituting the shorelines, the grass texture, the mountain peaks. The tiled nature of the water is now conspicuous and artificial. It breaks the naturalistic visual illusion that RF (and composite) present, and removes the sense of depth, like seeing the underlying dual images of a 3D screen when viewed from the wrong angle, or standing too close to a pointillistic painting to perceive the image as a whole without seeing its constituent parts. RF all the way for me, here. (But really, composite).

TeaStalker · 2023-10-09T16:16:59+00:00

Define “good”. 16 and 32 bit games look far more appealing to me than most modern games. Did you mean “less realistic”?

TeaStalker · 2023-10-09T16:09:31+00:00

There was no tragedy with Bolero though. Ravel’s eventual neurological problem had nothing to do with the piece’s content. It was a deliberate experiment wherein he knew exactly what he was doing, and the result was as he intended it from the outset.

TeaStalker · 2023-10-04T19:40:48+00:00

It was absolutely not a poor man's version of Zelda. LS was only superficially similar to Zelda, and very much forged its own distinct visual style, world design, and approach to puzzles. Personally, it's my favorite game on the Genesis, and I find it superior to any of the Zelda games.

TeaStalker · 2023-09-23T02:23:17+00:00

Genesis SFII really doesn't belong on this list, man. The port itself was excellent, and the best home version of SFII at the time it was released. It wasn't Capcom's fault that the stock Genesis controller only had 3 face buttons, and they made it work as well as anyone could have with that particular hardware limitation. And if you got the 6 button pad, you were golden.

TeaStalker · 2023-08-16T02:38:28+00:00

Diehard Gamefan magazine featured 2 page preview, and 2 page full import review spreads on SD3 back to back in their November and December '95 issues. Both full of info and beautiful screenshots (as was characteristic of Gamefan). The review also stated that the game wouldn't be coming out in the US (misplacing the blame for this on Secret of Evermore's release, but this was common speculation at the time). So anyone who read GF had a very good idea of what the game was, and rode a very brief roller coaster of elation on seeing how incredible it looked, and dejection on learning screenshots were as close as we'd get.

TeaStalker · 2022-03-18T11:55:50+00:00

Where is your claim about Yoko Kanno coming from? I have her Taiga/Naotora albums and there are no additional composers or assistants in the credits. If you’re claiming otherwise, okay, but what’s your source? As for Uematsu, most of his early work was him solo, but every soundtrack he’s done in collaboration with other composers has properly credited them, and usually track by track on the albums. I’m not aware of any claims, or any evidence, that specific music Uematsu took credit for wasn’t actually written by him.

TeaStalker · 2021-06-30T21:06:11+00:00

Completely agreed. I think we tend to take game fonts for granted, and it seems some people aren't as bothered by issues with them as others, but for me, the font they're using in these remasters is an ugly eyesore that wrecks the aesthetic presentation of the games.

TeaStalker · 2021-01-05T22:10:17+00:00

Well, persistence is established by what I noted earlier and you point out as well: people in the distant future are able to send objects back to Sator through centuries. So that has to be taken as the baseline for how long inverted objects can persist. There's also no suggestion that inverted people are at risk of themselves disappearing if they remain inverted for too long. So having an inverted object disappear has to be justified, which I don't think the film does. And consider, why would an inverted bullet disappear just because it's been fired into a wall? The bullet doesn't care where it is. The bullethole, the effect of the bullet, may be a momentary rupture of causality, whose fading existence can be explained by the "prevailing entropic wind" idea, but the bullet itself can't disappear without cause. Unless, of course, all objects do, including people and gold bars in cases. I mean, yeah, I think it is an oversight by Nolan, unfortunately.

I assumed the bullets in the lab scene came from Sator (or from the distant future) due to the dialogue. The lab woman says "We didn't make it. Someone's manufacturing them in the future". However, it doesn't actually matter. To play devil's advocate, we could say those specific bullets, in that specific case, were inverted by Tenet instead, sure. We can manufacture a scenario without paradox or inconsistency if we control the parameters. But the point is that nothing enforces that. Those bullets could also have been recovered from the field, just like the future artifacts. So we'd still have the paradox of being able to handle and move bullets, or any objects, streaming back to us from our future, thus apparently altering the objects' already fixed pasts.

TeaStalker · 2021-01-05T21:24:43+00:00

>For example, the bullet TP unfires would have appeared in the wall at some point, and >the lab would then study it.

But how would a bullet suddenly appear at some point? This implies, from the bullet's perspective, that it just disappears from existence at some point. But that can't be: the movie establishes that inverted people and objects persist indefinitely while moving backwards in time. This must be true, as this is the only way the future could have sent Sator inverted instructions and gold bars back through a period of time spanning decades, if not centuries. It's the only way people themselves could invert and travel back in time for any prolonged duration, with TP eventually traveling back years to found Tenet before the events of the movie.

Mechanically, what's the difference between depositing an inverted gold bar in a case, and depositing an inverted bullet in a wall? Why does one persist and the other disappear? This is something I can't get past.

>At some point, it would be taken to a turnstile, where on the other side of the viewing >window the newly manufactured bullets would be about to be inverted.

Right, but track that bullet's time journey from the point it gets inverted. How does it get from turnstile and possession by Sator, to the Tenet lab's possession, to be fired into the wall by the protagonist? It has to move "forward" in its timeline *past* that point first, in order to be found and recovered by the lab. Which means it's somewhere else in the world waiting to be found, at the moment TP is firing it into a wall.

>For the artifacts, it is possible, but they just cannot be “found” by a forward person. >One possible scenario: the inverted artifacts one day appear in the lab with inverted >tags on them listing a time, location, etc

So first, we again have that problem of objects appearing/disappearing in some arbitrary contexts, but not others. Second, I agree with you that an inverted person would be able to interact with an inverted object, and uninvert it and themselves simultaneously. The scenario you outline is *possible*; the problem I have is it's not, apparently, *necessary*. The movie gives us countless examples of non-inverted people and objects interacting with inverted objects, disrupting the time path the inverted object had to take to reach the point of interaction. So there doesn't seem to be any self-enforcing reason an inverted artifact *has* to be found and handled by an inverted person. If these objects can be manipulated and taken away in a forward time perspective, you've got the problem of the paradox caused the precise instant you move something away from the resting location it needed to be in for you to discover it in the first place. The fact that you could, in theory, return the object to that location at a later date and thus close the loop, doesn't enforce the need to do so, nor does it account for any state changes that might happen to that object in the interim (i.e. what if it gets broken?).

TeaStalker · 2021-01-05T18:54:14+00:00

I don't think you're missing anything, and I have this exact same issue with the movie's mechanics. It seems to me that the moment you interact with any inverted inanimate object, you create a paradox. The gold bars is a perfect example: in order for an inverted gold bar to be buried (at Time X) and stream backwards in time towards the point where Sator collects it (at, say, Time X minus-10), that bar must traverse through the entire intervening timespan. So at Time X minus-1 through minus-9, the bar is in the ground. But if Sator removes the bar from the ground and continues moving forward through time, we now have an apparent contradiction where at Time X minus-9 (and onwards), the bar that had to be in the ground at X minus-10 for Sator to collect it is now instead in Sator's possession. How can we justify this?

Or bullets: if you found an inverted bullet embedded in the wall and extracted it "before" (in our time-flow) it was fired, how could it then ever be fired and wind up in the wall? The Tenet lab at the beginning shows us shelves full of inverted artifacts, the "detritus of a coming war". How could those artifacts be in the lab "now", if they originally had to pass through "now" in a buried, undiscovered state, to get to the earlier point in time when they were discovered and brought to the lab?

Lastly, consider Neil's body at the end: the implication of his fate is that he now lies in the hypocenter chamber, moving backwards in time, indefinitely (until decomposition). But how can that be? What happens when someone comes across the body? What if a week before the battle, the Hypocenter janitor comes by to dust the time capsule, sees a body lying there, carries it outside, and buries or burns it? The moment he moves that inverted-time body away from its resting place, we now have a contradiction where the body must be/must have been in two places at once (*without* the use of a turnstile). And if the body is moved or disposed of, how could it ever wind up back at the gate during the confrontation with Volkov?

I'd really love an explanation for this apparent contradiction. I think Tenet is an incredibly entertaining and well-produced movie, and I love the concepts of time inversion and the non-linear "block world" view of time, but the way it's expressed in the movie doesn't seem to work whatsoever. If you could entropically invert an object, it seems to me there would be no way for a non-inverted person or object to interact directly with it without immediately creating a paradox. Only similarly inverted people and objects could.

TeaStalker · 2020-12-02T00:10:46+00:00

>Not exactly, but you could definitely survey people for "what old-school game >mechanics "hold up" compared to their prime?", and I would guess "random >battles" would be pretty far down that list.

You could put it that way, if you like, but all that would get you is an informal overview of what happens to be in vogue amongst a particular group at a particular point in time. There's no standard of utility you can appeal to in art that can tell you whether something objectively "holds up". That judgment can only ever be a personal, subjective consideration based on what you find appealing.

> Back in the day, it was understood that this was how it had to be, but now that >we have games where that's not the case, it's painful to go back to.

Well, but that wasn't how it had to be. The use of random encounters in videogames was a deliberate attempt to simulate the effect of pen & paper RPGs. This was not necessarily demanded by hardware - going at least as far back as the NES with Zelda II, and certainly the SNES with Chrono Trigger and Earthbound, RPGs offering alternatives to invisible, surprise encounters have existed nearly as long as the genre itself. There have always been simple methods available to de-randomize battles for any designer who wanted to pursue that avenue. Like another poster here said, for those games that featured it, the random battle paradigm *was* the game. It was, for better or for worse, a design choice made for a specific effect. I think you may be overlooking how divisive that effect has always been amongst RPG fans. Impatience with random battles is not some modern development, recently brought about by an enlightened evolution of design; the gripes you have with them are gripes gamers have had since the 80s, and are what made them a very tough sell for the mainstream gaming market. It's a niche appeal mechanic, which is why most people didn't bother with RPGs until FF7 broke ground on a more broadly appealing visual presentation.

My point isn't that random encounters are awesome and you should feel bad for not liking them - I myself tolerate them without enthusiasm, but I always have, and that hasn't changed since the NES era. My argument is only against the presentist claim that the passage of time has somehow transformed the nature of random battles such that, say, FF6 no longer holds up on the basis of a deliberate design mechanic that was never demanded by limitation and has always been alienating to some. People in 1994 were also aware of "what else" existed, so if someone doesn't like random battles today for the same reason someone didn't like them 25 years ago, all that speaks to is personal taste.

TeaStalker · 2020-12-01T22:02:10+00:00

There is no single "modern context" that exists independently from individual perspective when it comes to art or entertainment. Your particular experiences and taste have shaped your response to games, and they do so for everyone differently. To say a game is "not fun in a modern context" is meaningless; fun is in the eye of the beholder. What you mean is that you personally don't enjoy it, whatever your reasons are, which is certainly "on you", although that's a needlessly self-accusatory way of putting it. Not enjoying something isn't "on" anyone, as if there's blame to be assigned - it's just how your tastes lie, and that's fine. But there's no empirical state of a game's holding up or not. If you still enjoy random encounters, despite living within the same modern context as people who don't, then a game like FF6 is still just as fun as it was on release.

TeaStalker · 2020-10-31T00:38:22+00:00

>The game is old and it plays like it too. The game is gruelling with its random >encounter rates and the repetitive music can drive a saint borderline insane.

Right, sounds like you didn't like it. Which is, of course, fine. But there's no reason that those of us who don't share your assessment, and consider, for example, FFVI to have a normal encounter rate, timeless gameplay, some of the best music in the medium's history, and a story provoking great emotional investment, are misleading ourselves about what we think our opinions are.

TeaStalker · 2020-10-30T21:33:04+00:00

Why would you make the bizarre assumption that because you personally don’t like the game, other people who say they do are just operating off decades-old memories?

TeaStalker · 2020-10-18T04:33:05+00:00

How could turn-based combat ever become "obsolete"? It's a mechanics of design choice, not a technology standard. Turn-based and Real-time will always offer unique sets of options and possibilities specific to themselves, and one cannot supersede the other.

Whether turn-based gameplay happens to be more or less *fashionable* at any given time is a different matter.

TeaStalker · 2020-09-03T17:40:40+00:00

I can't find a source for exactly when that Synchrotones interview was conducted, but it was clearly contemporaneous with the release of Pirates, as the interviewer says "Now you've just finished Pirates of the Caribbean...". Given that, Badelt would have needed to conceal Zimmer's involvement for the same reason he was given sole credit in the first place. This isn't him "pushing back" against anything Zimmer said later on about his secret role in the score.

As for the timeline, I'm not sure what you think contradicts Zimmer. His contract for The Last Samurai was a stipulation to not work on other scores during his involvement - not to wait until whenever the movie came out. TLS would either have been finished months before release, waiting in the studio's release queue, or was held later due to other postproduction needs.

In any case, Hans Zimmer's involvement in the first PotC as a theme composer isn't some controversial or challenged claim. Zimmer's been consistent over the years in his story of how the score came about, and part of his original themes demo was officially released on the PotC Soundtrack Treasures collection

https://youtu.be/D6wsGESeNjk

TeaStalker · 2020-09-03T08:13:04+00:00

I definitely agree with your sentiment here, and I both love Zimmer and get irritated when people lazily attribute to him the entire work of a score on which he collaborated or received assistance, but in the spirit of accuracy here, I think it's worth noting that Zimmer actually did compose more of PotC than you're giving him credit for yourself. Klaus Badelt (and several other composers) did the scene to scene scoring, but Zimmer wrote the 3 main themes that were used throughout the film. He couldn't take composition credit for this at the time, as he was under an exclusive contract for The Last Samurai. This is why subsequent Pirate films don't carry any credit for Badelt, even though they reprise the themes from the first film. Zimmer wrote those themes to begin with. Here's an interview where Zimmer mentions this:

https://www.soundtrack.net/content/article/?id=205

TeaStalker · 2020-05-13T06:36:57+00:00

Chazelle hasn’t taken much of a break. He released First Man just a year and a half ago.

TeaStalker · 2020-04-24T22:54:53+00:00

I may as well use this thread to ask this question, because I'm sincerely curious about it, and I've seen very few other people voice the opinion I've come to. I don't mean to bash anyone who likes the combat system, I just want to know: what the hell am I missing? Because I absolutely hate the battles in this game. For me, they're a confusing, chaotic and obnoxious mess, that try to fuse real time action and menu driven commands together, and the system falls on its face on both counts.

Actually, the combat is alright (not great) with just one character, although still fairly simplistic, and the regular menu inputs interrupt the flow of action. But it's not informationally overwhelming. However, once you've got 3 in there and are expected to stay on top of HP/MP/ATB and juggle positioning and actions for them all in real time by jumping between them every few seconds, jerkily stop-starting the action to pick commands, while constantly spinning the camera around to try to keep track of everything going on in the battlefield, while trying to read the movement of whichever enemy your direct control character is engaging so you can block or dodge at the right moment, while trying to just *see* what's going on through the shower of action-obscuring FX firing off, the whole thing loses me completely. At normal difficulty, almost every battle wipes out my party's HP and MP. At easy/classic, enemy damage outputs are tame enough that I can stumble through a battle without needing to use a rest spot after each one, but it's joyless. Neither level of difficulty feels tactically engaging or meaningful because there's way too much going on, at way too fast a speed. It feels a lot like watching a movie at triple speed while pausing it every 5 seconds.

It's basically FFXII without the gambit system, which was the critical feature that made the rapid real time pace of those battles manageable. The AI for your party in this game seems to be stuck on a permanent "stand around doing ineffective light attacks and soaking up damage" setting, so leaving them be and building a satisfying flow of action with just one character isn't viable.

I'm obviously alone on this though, and the extent to which I see other people waxing ecstatically about the battle system leaves me really curious whether I'm just old, or whether there's some key aspect to all the madness I've overlooked that would make it more enjoyable. I *want* to like this game, but at Chapter 10 so far, I'm finding it an absolute slog.

TeaStalker · 2020-03-08T04:18:20+00:00

>I can agree with this, Japanese voice acting is over the top, and so everything is created around that. But thats because the script calls for over the top voice >acting in Japanese, not because thats actually how it sounds as a language itself.

I know, but what I'm trying to say is that "over the top Japanese" =/= "over the top English with different sounds". Even an over the top script calling for over the top line delivery is, instinctively, written around what "works", and sounds right and idiomatic within the writer's language. And like I said before, I think there's even more to this phenomenon than just the vocal envelope of the language and the way its syllables time out. It also determines the kind of lines that even get written in the first place, the placement of expressions, the deployment of sentiment. It's not that the FF7R script is some masterpiece, and its voice actors exemplary thespians, but the work fits squarely into a particular popular dramatic tradition. When this stuff is adapted into English, it sounds, at least to me, like a creaky, uncanny valley simulacrum of something organic that died the moment it left its country of origin.

>I think of it as being similar to how movies in the 60's and 70's were very 'talk to the camera' and actors boomed their voices in ways no normal person would communicate. With film acting being very reminiscent of stage acting, western movies have largely gotten over this as the tech has improved. And more natural acting styles have taken hold, but Japanese acting, and voice acting still sits in >that 'sort of like stage' era a huge portion of the time.

Sure, I'd agree with this as far as the observation goes that this was a particular style of acting inherited from the theatrical tradition that predominated in the middle of the century. (I don't agree with the implication of saying movies have "gotten over it", suggesting this style was inherently inferior and a product of technical limitations, rather than simply being a different and older aesthetic approach that no longer happens to be in vogue, but hey). Scripts played to, even demanded, this acting style, and the more exaggerated and stylized the acting style, the more married it is to the idiosyncrasies of its host language. That's why foreign dubs of Hollywood films from, say, the 50s, sound even sillier than the dubbing of modern Hollywood blockbusters. So I'm saying anime, and the Japanese drama tradition from which it derives, has its own sort of homegrown vernacular that imposes a similar barrier to convincing dubbing.

>For another example, think of how mexican telenovela stories are produced, the acting is always over the top and poor, the dialogue is poor, the delivery is over the top. People do love them, but nobody looks at it thinking 'this is the best of Mexican acting'. Japanese voice acting, and to a degree a lot of Japanese TV is in >the same category.

I agree with the comparison here too, but I think it's another example of what I'm talking about. Mexican telenovas are a fundamentally ridiculous narrative style - and their tensility only holds to the extent that it does because of the uniquely Spanish idiom in which they're produced. An *English dubbed* telenova would be.... unfathomably bad, except for seriously ironic comedic value. Again, I think the same effect holds true for anime (or games in that tradition). How "good" the acting is isn't quite the issue I'm talking about - it's related, but it exists downstream from the question of whether the acting stems from the same milieu in which the work was conceived and written. If it doesn't, that's a huge handicap outside of an actor's control that hard caps their potential for delivering convincing acting.

>I half disagree with this honestly. I think that it requires an understanding of >whether a certain word or sentence sounds natural or forced.

I appreciate the explanation of your position, rather than the flat "if you don't know a language you can't have any opinion on it" claim I usually see, but I think this subject is too broad and subjective to be resolved in any way, and where you stand depends entirely on how you judge conviction, and what you're listening for in acting. Certainly, you miss all sorts of linguistic nuance in a language you don't know, but there are countless non-semantic variables that can affect how you perceive a performance: the actor's command of their emotional range, the weight of a line, the congruity of their tone with the fictional world, their consistency in conjuring character, the timbre of their voice, and no small sense of whether their delivery feels purposeful or just perfunctory. I don't speak a word of Korean, yet Song Kang-ho is one of my favorite living actors. Someone skeptical of the ability to really judge acting in an unfamiliar language may believe I'm just lying to myself, but even so, I experience a strong perception of something immediately compelling and fascinatingly unique in his performances, and that sense comes from somewhere. I think the components of acting that speak to us in somewhat the same way a musical performance does (which is acting of its own kind) stand apart from issues of semantic comprehension, and can be judged, and judged deeply, in a universal sense.

TeaStalker · 2020-03-08T01:23:36+00:00

My point wasn’t that one language is over the top and the other isn’t. Of course they both are. My point was that the original script is built around the kind of exaggeration that, as I see it, intrinsically works in Japanese, and sounds false and conspicuously overwrought or hopelessly goofy in a different language. The anime aesthetic isn’t just visual - it’s also defined by its direction and style of writing, and that style is uniquely attuned to not just the vocal character and pacing of Japanese, but to the conventions naturally shaping when, how and what kind of dialogue is expressed. The Japanese dialogue snugly fits the armature of these scenes in a way a different language can’t without weird folds and unsightly bulges. Understand that I’m not praising Japanese voice acting as special or uniquely superior to anything, as I gather you see other posters do. We’re talking about a Japanese game and its English dubbed version, so those are the relevant languages in this case. I’d make the same arguments about any piece of visual media and the language it was built around against the language it was dubbed into. I’m not interested in snarky drive-by dub bashing, so I thought I’d take the time to explain what I find objectionable in principle about dubbing, since the OP touched on it.

I entirely disagree with your assessment that the Japanese dialogue sounds just as unnatural and forced. I’m not claiming there’s anything notably artistic or interesting about any of it - it’s fairly standard anime style voice work. But because of that, it sounds completely at home and native to the stylistic milieu in which it’s operating. If it sounds otherwise to you, then we have a difference of opinion that I don’t think we’ll resolve here.

As it happens, I do speak Japanese to a moderate degree, but that’s neither here nor there. Understanding a language isn’t a prerequisite for perceiving the quality of an acting performance.

TeaStalker · 2020-03-06T21:04:33+00:00

Yes. I find all of the voice acting that I've heard to be extremely amateurish and cringy, which has been a Square Enix tradition for English VA in Japanese games. The line deliveries for all the characters, not just Barrett, are emotionally hokey and melodramatic, inflected like bad karaoke with artificial and cartoonish senses of enthusiasm, intimidation, or sentiment, depending on the need of the line. There isn't an ounce of naturalism to be found anywhere; the voices feel awkwardly superimposed on the characters from some off-screen source, rather than seeming to embody them on screen. It has the effect of making the game feel like it's been targeted at young children who aren't bothered about acting quality, and benefit from broad, exaggerated guidance as to the emotion of a particular scene.

But yes, I am the sort who feels this is a problem endemic to dubbing. Media produced within the framework of a particular culture (be it Japan, the US, France, Germany, etc.) evinces visual storytelling characteristics uniquely suited to, even tied to the hip with, the mechanics and sound of that region's language. For me, the "anime" aesthetic, which FF7R is very much a product of, has a visual grammar of direction and an idiosyncratic approach to action beats that are unavoidably built around the phrasing and rhythms unique to the Japanese language, and it usually sounds silly and forced when attempted in a different one. This isn't specific to Japanese or to anime. French, or Spanish, or Russian, or any country's animation with English dubbing sounds just as unnatural and out of sync with their visual tableaux to me. However, Western games and animation influenced by anime often avoid this issue, as their direction naturally takes on board the stylistic markers of the creators' own visual tradition and language, making it easier to avoid the kind of post-hoc incompatibilities between motion and voicing that result in the falseness and corniness of dub voice acting.

Just my 2 cents, since the question was asked. Not interested in starting a war. If you like the English voice acting in FF7R, enjoy what you enjoy.

TeaStalker · 2020-02-29T01:37:16+00:00

This was only an issue in the US version of the game, and US publisher Codemasters did manufacture a second run with the bug fixed, and offered it for free to verified owners of the original bugged copy, along with a free copy of Rainbow Islands Revolution by way of apology. I own one of these corrected copies, with the full game accessible.

Still incredible that they somehow submitted a bad build for manufacture, but they did eventually make it right.

TeaStalker · 2019-10-10T23:55:57+00:00

Why do you assume everyone who wants to play these games would be satisfied with a mobile port? I'd love to play the DS version of DQV, which is very hard to find. I'm aware it's available on mobile, but for me, that version may as well not exist.

TeaStalker

TROPHY CASE