RetroGaming

I laugh every time I see the words "literally unplayable" because of minor headache

Started with Atari 2600, now VR simrig racing.

I remember walking into Blockbuster one day, and they had a playable Super Mario 64. I was blown away by a game where you could move in 3D with graphics like that.

I think the next couple jumps were very good too.

Ps1 was just polygons, you could see all the edges and the games were not complex.

Then ps2 happened, now you get games like gta 3 and gran turismo. San Andreas was one of the longest and most in depth games in terms of all the mini games inside.

After that, came imo the peak of game graphics. Sure, some today might be technically better, but at the time, Crysis on very good hardware looked almost indistinguishable from reality. I remember seeing some highly detailed renders of people’s faces and thinking how it was just like real life.

After Crysis, there wasn’t really any other “big jump” unless you count the hard drive space requirements.

Having said that, bf3 and red dead 2 felt like milestones.

I vividly remember when I saw the first game with filtered textures on a vodoo 1 gpu. The individual pixels... were gone! It was mind blowing :)

Also being from '84, I can absolutely relate. Although I mostly skipped ps1 for the N64. Super Mario 64 was a masterpiece.

I’m from around the same time and the amount of content to get through nowadays is insane by comparison. I could easily go and pick up a game that’s 10 years old and enjoy without feeling that old, I mean, GTA5 is 10 years old now, and Skyrim’s 13 years old.

In 1996 Mario 64 came out but if you went back 10 years people were still playing the first Super Mario Bros.

I started out on a Commodore 64. I remember when I encountered my first 3d accelerated game, I think it was Microsoft Motocross Madness, at a friend's house, IIRC he had a 400mhz pentium with a Matrox card, I want to say G400, but who knows, it was so long ago.... Anyway 3D games were common, but not with accelerated graphics... It was mind-blowing.

I'm a bit older than you but I feel that games have stagnated. It's the same games over and over again with some exceptions.

I'm an elder millennial (1984)

As a millennial born a few years before you, I don't really appreciate the "elder" wording you used there. I'd threaten violence, but I hurt my knee walking the other day and I don't think that'd be good for either of us.

My first videogame machine was for black and white TVs and had 10 games, and all of them bar the target shooting game were variants of Pong.

PS2 was the last really big graphical leap. My fucking mind was blown by GTA3.

Since then we've had higher resolution, normal maps, physically based rendering and now raytracing, but none of it really feels that huge when moving from one gen to the next. PS2 came out and everything from before was obsolete, instantly. It even had backwards compatibility but I think I used it exactly once just to see the texture "improvements" (they actually just blurred them). This gen I've used it all the time.

Its a truly unique experience that only WE experienced. Anyone much older, wasn't interested in video games, and anyone much younger, was gaming in realistic 3D before they could understand what was even happening.

I feel it's similar to the person in the early 1900s who had a horse & cart as a kid and experienced the invention of cars, highways, planes and eventually space travel.

My biggest "wow" effect was Gran Turismo (1). The moving reflections on the cars!

～(つˆ0ˆ)つ｡☆

The closest I've felt to those monumental leaps in recent history was the first time I played VR. It feels similarly mind-blowing.