You must log in or # to comment.
I do. I don’t want or need top notch graphics. My ps5 collects dust.
SNES, Genesis and TG16 do have top notch graphics for those who can’t do without them.
Gameplay is always king.
Graphics can contribute a lot - some games are fucking gorgeous, and I’ll stop and appreciate good scenery in digital environment the same as IRL.
But jaw-droppingly incredible graphics can never compensate for bad or even mediocre gameplay.
And shit graphics will never kill a game with good gameplay. Done right, shit graphics can even be charming in a nostalgic kind of way.
Famicom owner checking in.
Given that nowhere in the article does it say that 14% of people exclusively play on pre-2000 hardware I don’t find this that surprising.
I’m more shocked by the last statistic, 11% of American households still use fax. Fax? Fuckin’ why? That’s like saying people still listen to music on Edison cylinders.
According to American Dad! widespread continued use would have gotten us the blorfer.
Fax is commonly used at least in the US because it has regulatory recognition as a secure means of transferring information, it’s highly interoperable, and it doesn’t really have a successor that has caused the network effect to die out entirely.
11% seems slightly higher than I’d expect, but not crazy. Contracts, medical records, interactions with the government are all good reasons to need to send or receive one occasionally. That about 1 in 10 households did last year? Makes some sense.
Seems crazy to me. I can’t imagine that 1 in 10 household even have fax machines. All the stuff you mention is business and medical stuff. Nobody faxes in their medical requests from home.
Except for maybe people who have terrible health problems or those who care for them
Nah. They might do it from work or maybe by email gateway.
Hell it’s only even possible for the 27% of homes that still have a landline. There’s just no way.
There are a lot of people with old technology in their home that still gets used. Fax is still needed for lots of medical things, and not everyone has an office to go to.
Think retired people taking care of sick family members.
Nah. It’s got a big fat [citation needed] from me.
10% of people? Sure I’d believe that 10 % of people have transferred data using fax technology at least once in the past year or something. But 10% of households, and you can’t count email to-fax gateways?
No way.
The citation is in the article which is from a Consumer Reports study. In case you don’t know, they’re very trustworthy.
I’m not attempting to convince you that the figure is accurate because I don’t need to that. I’m attempting to get you to understand that a big portion of the population of the USA are just making do with what they have.
I live in an area with a large population of Amish, they fax everything.
Signatures as a form of authorization I think held up the facsimile tech way past it’s best by date
I don’t know about you, but here in Europe you just send everything in digitally now
I give my fax number to anything that asks me for a phone number. It’s a valid number that can’t recieve calls, meaning when my number is inevitably leaked/purchased by telemarketers, scammers, etc. I don’t even notice.
Emulated games are free, polished, complete
Modern games are $80+ steaming incomplete pile of shit
This mystery will never be solved.
I assume they’re referring to actual hardware. I’d imagine the percentage of gamers playing emulated games is much higher than 14%.
Edit: Found the article
It appears I am correct.
Modern games: requires $300+ game console or a $300+ GPU to get 30 FPS
Retro games: runs on your grandma’s Dell Pavilion still running Windows XP that she refuses to stop using, gets 50/60 depending on region
Almost all of my modern games are indies. Most cost between $5 and $30. I love retro too but if we’re going to only include modern “AAA” titles in the comparison…
That… doesn’t sound right. 14% is a ridiculous amount of people.
Full survey data. That’s far from the only stat that’s hard to believe.
“Still” is really not the way to phrase it.
A good chunk of the people playing on retro systems never even owned half the systems back in the day which they have collected now. Or they might be new people getting into the hobby who perhaps weren’t even born when those systems were current.
People can’t “still” be doing something that they were NOT doing before!
It’s such a strange way of looking at a hobby which is more popular now than it ever was.
It’s true and I love the newcomers. But my NES and N64 were both purchased at release and are still one-owner. And used regularly. I also have a 4070ti but I love those old systems.
Being able to actually play neo Geo games would make young me so envious Also the full arcade version of games with a button for “insert coin”.
Yeah, the Neo Geo really is that console that was an outrageous luxury back in the day.
There is an arcade near me which is flat fee for entry and every machine is on free-play. It’s very satisfying to be able to keep pressing continue as much as you like.
People can’t “still” be doing something that they were NOT doing before!
An individual cannot but a group of people can.
“Children are still fascinated by sticks” is as true as always, even though the individual children have mostly grown up, grown old, and died.
Of course. And that’s because “still” has two meanings. One being “the same now as always” and the other being “in a continuing state, uninterrupted”
Which one the reader will interpret is dependent on context.
“75% of children still fascinated by sticks” is very likely to mean different groups of children surveyed years apart - the ‘unchanged’ meaning.
“14% of adults over 50 still keep a pair of 80s flared jeans in their wardrobe” is very likely to mean it is the same adults who were wearing them back in the 80s - the ‘uninterrupted’ meaning.
The problem is that for this article, neither of those valid meanings make sense - at least not to me.
It is not ‘uninterrupted’ because we know that lots of people stopped playing old systems, while other people joined the hobby.
It is also not ‘unchanged’, because the levels of people playing 90s consoles will have dipped to a low somewhere in the middle and then bounced back thanks to renewed interest and modern hobbyist technologies that make these things more accessible now than they were just 10 years ago.
It’s altogether a different situation now than it was then, and that’s why I find “still” to be a poor choice of phrase regardless of the meaning intended.
Games don’t exist beyond the 1980-1999 filter on Gog, tbh.
I mean you OWNED the games after purchase back then, now the publishers and game studios can revoke your “purchased” license anytime…
The physical medium is a license as well. But that’s semantics. We can all agree if you own physical, it cant be (realistically) taken away. You can still own physical. You can still take that power back (unless the game requires online). When I got a PS5, I was planing on finally ending my attachment to physical discs… but I just couldn’t do it. To this day, I still buy PS5 discs, I haven’t spent anything on PSN, but had PS+ for maybe two years and Im well aware those PS+ games were transactional. I cant do that anymore on PC so if steam dies, so does my library. At least my physical discs will be OK. Now on to my next fear… disc rot. Will I actually be able to boot up the Halo 3 DVD when im 80 and play it?
GBC almost exclusively these days, I just can’t devote the time to things like Morrowind anymore as much as I want to. I do want to hack my OG Xbox and run Voodoo Vince, Psychonauts, and Gauntlet: Dark Legacy again, but then that only brings me up to like 2003.
I wonder how many people “still” drive cars “released” before 2000?
Game consoles are solid-state and tend to not wear out like cars.
That said, my car is from 2003.
Without piracy and the industry wanting to move digital only we are doomed.
Keyword: “without”.
Does software count?
I’m knee deep in Caesar II and Total Annihilation campaigns
There’s not a lot of video games that don’t have software.
You’d have to back to what, Pong? I see Monaco GP from 1979 listed as one of the last TTL-based games from Sega, but not sure about other companies.
I should’ve just said PC, I don’t know what I was thinking
My brain must have just frozen when I was trying to think of a word in the absence of console
All good. I used to make a strong distinction between “video games” and “computer games” and at the time it was true but now the line has blurred to the point that the distinction is in interface style and the scale between reliability and versatility.
I’ve been playing Zombies Ate My Neighbors on original hardware today haha. On my old Apple color monitor.
I mostly game on old systems or my steam deck.
Oh man such a great game. Great couch co-op.
Yeah I tormented my poor daughter with it when she was younger. I did not have the patience to get her through it lol.
Now that she’s older we do great.
I don’t think I ever made it past the werewolf castle level without cheats.
None of my game consoles are younger than 2000. I can’t deal with PC gaming, I hate subscription models, and refuse to download “games” to my phone.
And some people play poker, or even chess. What can you do, people like old stuff.
