Comment by pwdisswordfishs

Comment by pwdisswordfishs 3 days ago

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> The PlayStation 2’s library is easily among the best of any console ever released, and even if you were to narrow down the list of games to the very best, you’d be left with dozens (more like hundreds) of incredible titles. But the PS2 hardware is getting a bit long in the tooth

Besides the library, the PS2 is the most successful video game console of all time in terms of number of units shipped, and it stayed on the market for over ten years, featured a DVD drive, and at one point was positioned by Sony not just as an entertainment appliance but as a personal computer, including their own official PS2 Linux distribution.

In a more perfect world, this would have:

(a) happened with a hypothetical hardware platform released after the PS2 but before the PS3, with specs lying in between the two: a smidge better than the former, but not quite as exotic as the latter (with its Cell CPU or the weird form factor; whereas the PS2's physical profile in comparison was perfect, whether in the original form or the Slim version), which could have:

(b) resulted in a sort of standardization in the industry like what happened to the IBM PC and its market of clones, with other vendors continuing to manufacture semi-compatible units even if/when Sony discontinued it themselves, periodically revving the platform (doubling the amount of memory here, providing a way to tap into higher clock speeds there) all while maintaining backwards compatibility such that you would be able to go out today and buy a brand new, $30 bargain-bin, commodity "PS2 clone" that can do basic computing tasks on it (in other words, not including the ability to run a modern Web browser or Electron apps), can play physical media, and supports all the original games and any other new games that explicitly target(ed) the same platform, or you could pay Steam Machine 2026 prices for the latest-gen "PS2" that retains native support for the original titles of the very first platform revision but unlocks also the ability to play those for every intermediate rev, too.

anonymous908213 3 days ago

> (a) happened with a hypothetical hardware platform released after the PS2 but before the PS3, with specs lying in between the two

I would argue strongly that the weak hardware is why the PS2, and other old consoles, were so good, and that by improving the hardware you cannot replicate what they accomplished (which is why, indeed, newer consoles have never managed to be as iconic as older consoles). You can make an equally strong case that the Super Famicom is the best console of all time, with dozens of 10/10 games that stand the test of time. I think the limitations of the hardware played a pivotal role in both, as they demanded good stylistic decisions to create aesthetically appealing games with limited resources, and demanded a significant level of work into curating and optimizing the game design, because every aspect of the game consumed limited resources and therefore bad ideas had to be culled, leaving a well-polished remainder of the best ideas in a sort of Darwinian sense.

> (b) resulted in a sort of standardization in the industry like what happened to the IBM PC and its market of clones, with other vendors continuing to manufacture semi-compatible units

Unlike the PC market, the comprehensive list of "other vendors" is two entries long. Is it a more perfect world if Nintendo manufactures knockoff Playstations instead of its variety of unique consoles? I don't think so.

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  • vlunkr 2 days ago

    I love retro consoles as much as the next middle aged software developer, but realistically, the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children. Every console generation is that special generation for one group of kids.

    I do agree that sometimes limitations breed creativity, but that’s not the only thing that can make the magic work.

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    • anonymous908213 2 days ago

      I know it's easy to trot out "nostalgia", but do you not think it's possible that older games can genuinely be better than newer games? I very much think it is common to find such games, even games I had never played in my youth. There were bad games then too, of course, and good games now, but I think the ratio of hits was higher. Particularly now that modern game development is so sloppy. Microtransaction-infested games rule the world, and while the indie scene does still produce excellent gems, most of them tend to be significantly less polished and rougher around the edges.

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      • vlunkr 2 days ago

        Yeah I think that individual retro games can be incredible and stand the test of time. For me Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night are timeless. As a whole though, it’s hard to measure. Today we have microtransactions, in the past we had games that threw in one bullshit level so you couldn’t beat it during a rental. (Lookin at you battletoads) and bad movie tie-ins, lazy arcade ports, etc. There’s always going to be trash.

        One thing retro games obviously don’t have is hindsight. Shovel Knight feels like the best NES games, but lacks crap like lives and continues, because it learned from later games like Dark Souls that you can make death punishing without making it un-fun. Hollow knight builds on my favorite games with a couple of decades of lessons on how to make platformers more interesting and less frustrating.

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      • pjerem 2 days ago

        I do feel like you miss the point if you compare retro games with today AAA games.

        The good video games of today are 100% indie.

        I love Super Mario Bros as much as the other guy, but a game like Celeste is objectively better in each and every aspect.

        I’m a 90’s kid and I had a blast with my N64, gamecube, Wii …

        But I’m also having a blast nowadays with :

        - Outer Wilds (it’s forbidden to say what it is)

        - RimWorld (colony builder)

        - Satisfactory (time vacuum)

        - Factorio (factory builder)

        - A Hat In Time (3d platformer with a lot of love for the n64/gc but with its own character)

        - Poi (same)

        - Vampire Survivors (dopamine fountain)

        - Tinykin (looks like Pikmin but actually the chilliest platformer I played : smooth, calm, beautiful, good design, good music)

        - Pizza Tower (Wario Land with a pizza twist and a lot of love)

        - Kathy Rain (point and click)

        - Stanley Parable (idk what it is but it was fun)

        - Evoland

        - The Touryist (chill adventure)

        - Super Meat Boy (hard platformer)

        - Celeste (hard platformer but that loves you and encourages you)

        - Hell Pie (3d platformer, ode to Conker Bad Fur Day)

        - Stardew Valley

        Etc …

        There are a lot more but I can already say that each and every game of this list gave me at least as much pleasure as my childhood games.

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      • GoblinSlayer 2 days ago

        I played Yoshi's island as an adult and think it's the best platformer game. I wonder if it counts as nostalgia.

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      • youngtaff 2 days ago

        IMV Super Monkey Ball on the GameCube is way better than any of it's successors

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    • surgical_fire 2 days ago

      I disagree.

      I routinely revisit old games with a critical mind. It is an interesting thing to do.

      I find that quite a few games I really loved as a kid are special because I played during a formative age, yes. Some are better left in the past.

      But I find some that still manage to impress me to this day. They are not good only as a memory, they are just really good.

      And a second counter is that my all-time favorite consoles are the SNES and the Switch. I have been gaming ever since the Atari 2600 days. The Switch was released well into my 30s. I have no nostalgia for it.

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      • vlunkr 2 days ago

        Maybe I wasn’t clear enough because I agree with everything you said lol. What I take issue with is the parent comment trying to assert that the SNES (or any console) is the greatest of all time. There’s too much subjectivity in art to make a statement like that. I’m trying to say that it’s nostalgia informing their opinion, even if they’re disguising it with technical arguments.

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    • Barrin92 2 days ago

      >the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children

      if you spend some time on youtube and look at people too young to even have been around play through those games it just becomes evident very quickly how wrong that assessment is. There's an energy even among young audiences when they're playing games like Metal Gear Solid 1&2 for the first time that you hardly see for anything coming out today.

      There was a level of artistic talent in that generation, also in animation of the time, that simply doesn't really have a parallel today and brushing it off as nostalgia has a lot to do with he inability of people to recognize that there's no linear progress in art. Talent can be lost, some periods are better than others, just having more cpu and gpu cycles available does not produce better art.

      The fact that almost 30 years after games like MGS it's still Kojima and a lot of Japanese guys now with increasingly gray hair who end up getting a lot of awards and pushing the envelope that should tell you something.

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      • sapphicsnail 2 days ago

        I think people forget there were a ton of shit SNES/PSX/whatever games. I personally have a soft spot for the 16 bit era but there are plenty of indie games coming out that are just as beautiful and creative. There's also way more exploration with narrative structure now then there was back then.

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      • vlunkr 2 days ago

        I can name 2 games too. Look at games like animal well or balatro. They’re wildly original and not made by old Japanese dudes.

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    • mistercheph 2 days ago

      Will people ever be nostalgic for the xbox one? For the iphone 14?

      I doubt it. These products might even be good, but they are not like their early ancestors in several significant ways that will have them relegated to the footnotes of history. Most importantly, they are difficult to distinguish from both their immediate predecessors and their immediate successors. I don't mean to say that people won't have treasured experiences from this time that they long for in 20 years, just that I doubt the console will play as significant of a role in the memory.

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      • abustamam 2 days ago

        I got an Xbox One in college. One thing that it had that I'm surprised my PS5 doesn't have was split screen functionality. You could play a game and watch TV (or do whatever else) at the same time. I never touched an XSX so I can't attest if it has something similar, but the concept was pretty neat.

        I wouldn't say I'm nostalgic for the X1, but it was a good piece of hardware.

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      • mlrtime 2 days ago

        Maybe not xbox one, but I was talking to younger folks about how I'd play mario kart for hours and hours...

        They didn't associate but then told me their own anecdotes with the Dreamcast. So my experience matches OPs, its the time/place more than the console.

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      • pjerem 2 days ago

        Just for the joke, I own the og Xbox One and it’s the only console I hated from day one.

        I clearly remember plugging it to my TV with excitement and being greeted with gigabytes of mandatory updates. And then I discovered that you weren’t able to play the game from the disk and that you need to install it on the fucking hard drive !! And then I discovered that the disc reader was actually slower than my fiber connection which means it was faster to play a game from the online store than installing it from a real disk.

        I think I had to wait for at least a full hour just to play my first game.

        And on top of that the performance was actually not that good. 30fps everywhere, it was worse than the Nintendo games on Wii / GameCube which usually ran at 50/60fps.

        I still own this shit but I never liked it. At least it was useful some month ago when I had to update my Xbox controller firmware (but since I didn’t power it on for years , I also had to wait for updates :) ).

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    • pjmlp 2 days ago

      I belong to the 8 and 16 bit home computers generation, which grew along those consoles, yet for those on my circle consoles weren't special, home computers were.

      Hence why I find funny the remarks of "PC gaming" is growing, for my crowd it was always there since the 1990's.

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      • wing-_-nuts 2 days ago

        >I find funny the remarks of "PC gaming" is growing

        If anything, with current prices, it's dying. I don't say this as a 'pc v console' flame. I'm saying that if you want your hobby to be widespread, sustainable and growing it needs to be accessible to a broke highschooler. PC gaming might be affordable to us tech workers, but it isn't to them, and that's a problem. Hell even console gaming has become very expensive in the last couple years. A ps5 is $500, which is reasonable for what you get, but the $70 games and $80 / yr PSN sub adds up.

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      • pezezin 2 days ago

        I am a bit younger (my first PC was a 486), but much like you I and most of my friends grew up with PCs. My happiest memories are endless evenings playing Counter Strike and Diablo 2 at Internet cafés.

        So yeah, PC gaming is growing... back home in Europe it has always been the number one platform!

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    • PetitPrince 2 days ago

      I join my voice in disgreeing with this. While some games can indeed be rose-tinted (I have fond memory of that Game Boy Spiderman game, and it's a terrible shoverware game), many of them are traiblazer (like, invented a genre) or are still standing on their own very well.

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      • leni536 2 days ago

        Some? There are tons of horrible old games, vastly outnumbering the good ones. It's just by now it's fairly established what the good games are and the bad ones are mostly forgotten my most.

        We simply don't have the same luxury with new games, they can be hit and miss, and reviews are untrustworthy.

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    • wing-_-nuts 2 days ago

      >the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children.

      If that were the case, we would only really love the games we grew up with. I stayed at an air bnb that had a ps2. I sat down and played ace air combat; a game I'd never touched on a console I'd never had as a child, and I had a blast.

      I also recently picked up fallout 1/2 for a couple bucks on steam, and while the controls and graphics weren't great, I still enjoyed the game even though I never touched it in childhood.

      Realistically, there are a few games for the xbox / ps2 era where the graphics really have not aged well, but for the most part I am not a pixel snob, at all.

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      • drdeca 2 days ago

        > If that were the case, we would only really love the games we grew up with.

        I’m not sure that’s true? Like, perhaps the preference might generalize from the several games one did play as a child to other games which are similar to the ones one played as a child, with the preference still being a result of which games one played as a child.

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      • vlunkr 2 days ago

        Sure, I didn’t say all old games are bad, we just have to be aware of nostalgia as a factor. It’s difficult for a game to match the ocarina of time for me, because I had simply never experienced something like that. As an adult I recognize that it is a good game, but also that someone who wasn’t there at the time isn’t going to see what I see in it.

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  • JoeyJoJoJr 3 days ago

    This might be a nitpick, but I could probably only count 5-10 SNES games that would be considered 10/10 IMO, and not many that I think are worth sinking decent time into these days, compared to something like Burnout Revenge - a great game but certainly not a 10/10 game.

    Still, I do find the SNES library, and 16bit games in general, quite astounding from a creative and artistic perspective, but not so much from a player’s perspective.

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    • anonymous908213 3 days ago

      A Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Kirby Super Star, Donkey Kong Country 1-3, Super Metroid, Megaman X series, Dragon Quest series, Final Fantasy series, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound... just off the top of my head, are all very much worth playing today.

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      • deaddodo 3 days ago

        The Dragon Quest series, while beloved, is hardly the epitome of peak SNES gaming. It’s always been (purposefully) extremely conservative and dated in its design.

        If you’re gonna go for quality SNES RPGs that show the console shining, you’d be better off with Terranigma, the Final Fantasy series, Tales of Phantasia, Chrono Trigger, etc, etc.

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      • scns 2 days ago

        Secret of Mana/Seiken Densetsu 2 11/10.

        Seiken Densetsu 3 is good too. Only released in Japan but got translated by fans to be played on emulators. Now part of Collection of Mana for Switch and officially remade in 3D for Switch, PS4, XBox and Windows named Trials of Mana.

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    • vimoses 2 days ago

      > This might be a nitpick, but I could probably only count 5-10 SNES games that would be considered 10/10 IMO firstly, this seems like a pretty flawed standard for evaluating a consoles library, no? but secondly, "5-10 10/10"s seems like a pretty good amount for any consoles library anyways, unless you value a "10/10" less than i guess i would

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      • JoeyJoJoJr 2 days ago

        I’m not criticizing the library of SNES. I have very fond memories playing SNES games. It was more in response to the statement that there are dozens of 10/10 games on SNES. Let me clarify, there are not many 10/10 games on SNES (or any system for that matter), let alone dozens.

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    • anthk 2 days ago

      Between JRPG's, plataformers, SMK and Top Gears you can sum more than 20.

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  • Someone 2 days ago

    > Unlike the PC market, the comprehensive list of "other vendors" is two entries long

    Before there was “a sort of standardization in the industry” the comprehensive list of “PC vendors” was one entry long.

    Years before that, there were several times there was “a sort of standardization in the industry”, both of which led to there being many vendors.

    - the Altair bus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus#IEEE-696_Standard: “In May 1978, George Morrow and Howard Fullmer published a "Proposed Standard for the S-100 Bus" noting that 150 vendors were already supplying products for the S-100 Bus”

    - CP/M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M#Derivatives: “CP/M eventually became the de facto standard and the dominant operating system for microcomputers, in combination with the S-100 bus computers. This computer platform was widely used in business through the late 1970s and into the mid-1980s.”

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  • trashb 2 days ago

    This reminded me of the following quote "Limitation breeds creativity", and therefore the PS2's limitations where instrumental to it's success.

    The PS2 in may ways was a great improvement on the PS1 however it was not easy to develop for and could do certain things very well, other things not so well. One example is the graphics due to the unusual architecture of the Emotion Engine (gpu). I think this forced the developers to consider what their games really required and where they wanted to spend the development effort, one of the key ingredients for good game design.

    Additionally the release hype of the PS2 was quite big and the graphics that where achievable where very good at the time, so developers wanted to go through the development pains to create a game for this console.

    Not to forget besides the mountain of great titles for the PS2 there is also a mountain of flopped games that faded into obscurity.

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delaminator 3 days ago

> and at one point was positioned by Sony not just as an entertainment appliance but as a personal computer with their own official PS2 Linux distribution.

to avoid EU import taxes

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pjmlp 2 days ago

As owner of PS2 Linux distribution and related hardware, it was sort of ok.

Sony intended it to be the evolution of Playstation Yaroze, fostering indie development, instead people used it mostly to run emulators on the PS2, hence why the PS3 version lost access to accelerated hardware for graphics.

PS2 Linux had hardware acceleration, the only difference was that the OpenGL inspired API did not expose all the capabilities of a regular DevKit.

Community proved that the development effort wasn't worth it.

The XBox arcade and ID@XBox programs have also taken these lessons into account, which is why you only see everyone running emulators on rooted XBoxes, not the developer mode ones.

The market of IBM PC clones only happened because of an IBM mistake, that was never supposed to happen, and IBM tried with the PS2 / MCA to take their control back, but the Pandora box was already open, and Compaq was clever with the way they did reverse engineer the BIOS.

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Izkata 2 days ago

> featured a DVD drive

Wasn't it also among the cheapest DVD players on the market back then?

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  • larrik 2 days ago

    Yes, it was like the same price (close enough) as a regular Sony DVD player, which was nuts.

    There were cheaper off-brand DVD players, of course.

    You did have to buy a remote separately, though, unless you wanted to use the game controller (which had a cord).

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    • prmoustache 2 days ago

      Back then, unless you were using a projector, the screens weren't that big so we seated clother to the screens.

      Besides there isn't that much operation you need to do with a DVD. Appart from volume control (which was set on the TV/speaker system command), you would just need a pause when you wanted to go for a pee so no big deal to only have the corded controller.

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BrtByte 2 days ago

Ironically, what you're describing is kind of happening now, just in software

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joshu 3 days ago

it was a dreadful, useless computer, even then

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  • nick238 3 days ago

    Unlike the PS3 which the US Air Force bought 1,760 and clustered into the 33rd most powerful** at the time.

    (**Distributed computing is very cheat-y compared to a "real" supercomputer which has insane RDMA capabilities)

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    • mywittyname 2 days ago

      We had clusters of them in university too.

      If all you needed to do was vector math, a dedicated vector processor with eight cores that are capable of running as fast as the extremely wide bus could feed them with data is the way to do it. You couldn't buy anything close to it's capabilities (for that specific task) for the money.

      I remember the course we used them in being hard as hell, and the professor didn't really have any projects prepared that would really push the system.

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    • ktm5j 2 days ago

      From what I understand (may be wrong) this is exactly the reason that they stopped allowing Linux installs on PS3s.

      People were buying them just for this purpose. However, the consoles were sold at a discount because Sony expected users to buy games, controllers, etc. If someone bought a PS3 alone, without anything else then Sony lost money.

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  • pwdisswordfishs 2 days ago

    "it was a dreadful, useless computer, even then"

    So you don't dispute the thesis that the hypothetical general-purpose machine described in the comment would have needed to have been been better than the PS2?

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