Summary
- Modern consoles lack the screen breaking effects seen in older games like Batman: Arkham Asylum.
- Older consoles used controller port swapping as a gameplay mechanic, a feature no longer practical.
- Early games masked small game worlds with fog to hide loading limitations, a technique no longer relevant in modern, expansive worlds.
Games have changed a lot over the years. Graphics command top-billing, millions of polygons and vertices blasted into our faces by machines that are more powerful in many regards than we ever thought would be possible. Gaming has come a long way from its early days of Ascii art based adventures to where we are now.
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It’s only natural, but we lost some things along the way, too. Many of the smoke and mirrors of early games just can’t be done anymore. Plenty of those tricks were done to disguise limitations of the consoles of the time, or grew outdated with the advancement of monitors and televisions. It’s not inherently a bad thing, but it’s interesting to see many tricks in these games that just don’t have the same effect anymore
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Screen Breaking Effects
Before the advent of pixel-perfect TVs, 4K resolutions and plasma displays, we relied on massive TVs that were filled with white noise when not tuned in to a source. For the most part, you wouldn’t notice this, but if any of the RCA connectors stared to come loose, you’d start getting distorted audio, crackling images, and so on. Modern TVs don’t quite have this, which makes one of Arkham Asylum’s most famed effects much less impactful.
Quite a distance into Batman: Arkham Aslyum, you’re chasing Scarecrow when suddenly, the screen starts to break, with graphical artefacts starting to cover the screen. You could still control Batman, which made it seem like it was your TV or console acting up, rather than an intentional act of the game itself. But that same parallels can’t be drawn with modern flatscreens.
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Swapping Controller Ports
Back in the day, which is to say pre-PS3, consoles were a much more tactile affair. Controllers had to be wired directly, all the buttons were physical on the console itself, and there were countless wires to hook it up and wire it. And while it wasn’t exceedingly common, some games took advantage of these many ports to an gameplay end.
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In the original MGS, there is the boss Pyscho Mantis who can read all of your inputs. So how are you meant to defeat him? You have to physically change the port your controller is plugged into. The Master Collection does a commendable job of trying to recreate the moment, but there’s just no way of fully replicating it with a wireless controller.
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Fog To Mask Small Worlds
When gaming was young, every new game felt like a massive leap. 2D became 3D, sharp polygonal faces were suddenly animated, and so on. But with those massive leaps came other areas of a game that needed to be hidden to disguise shortcomings. Something like GTA: San Andreas probably felt massive at the time, but take away that fog and you can see the whole map from just about anywhere.
The GTA trilogy is a great example of this, with the ports completing removing the fog and showcasing just how small the world is.
Silent Hill is another great example of this. While the fog that encases the town is remembered fondly for the atmosphere, it was used entirely to hide that the town only loaded in small chunks ahead of you. Consoles are too powerful now though, and worlds are expected to be massive. Fog just wouldn’t serve the same purpose if the world is already massive.
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Duplicating Characters For Reflections
Reflections are one of the big debates in gaming, from path-traced reflections with ray-tracing, to the more common and less graphically intensive subspace reflections. With modern ray-tracing, though still expensive, reflections can be made to appear more natural and realistic.
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Older games did not have this luxury, and found a rather inventive workaround – just duplicate everything. Nothing is a better reflection than the exact same thing. With how detailed many character models are now, to wholesale duplicate them would take a noticeable performance dip. It’s a big part of why you don’t see working mirrors in many games, new or old.
Today, everything is displayed in pixel perfection. This was the form on PCs for decades, but didn’t become commonplace on TVs until, around 2010 with HD screens. Up to then, CRTs dominated the home market, with the distinctive look and refresh effect something that had to be account for when creating games.
In the modern day, this has led to a rather unfortunate issue. Ports of older games look rough and pixelated, which for many is chalked up to nostalgia making you think they looked better. But on a CRT screen, they literally did. The effect of these screens caused pixels to bleed together, forming a smoother image. The PS1 Final Fantasy games shows exactly what happens to those pre-rendered backgrounds when boosted up to a pixel perfect, high resolution screen.
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Pre-Rendered Backgrounds That Look 3D
When games first started transitioning to 3D, making whole 3D environments was difficult. Cameras had to be changed to fit them, as well as movement. And in many regards, they were overall less detailed. The solution to this? Pre-rendered backgrounds. These were already incredible artists, and they didn’t need to give that up to create new 3D games.
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The original Resident Evil, and its Gamecube remake especially, are stellar examples of how amazing a pre-rendered background can fit a scene. And while it’s not strictly impossible to create now, that impression of depth on a pre-rendered background is much harder to present on modern systems.
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Proprietary Tech That Just Breaks
Games made today are the majority of the time designed to be made on as many systems as possible. As such, they utilise tech and systems that work everywhere, rather than proprietary ones. This is overall a good thing, letting more people experience more games, though it does sometimes result in a game that can’t quite reach its full potential.
This is most clearly seen in games that get ported to modern consoles. Some, like the Prince of Persia trilogy, lose a bunch of smaller details, such as lighting, audio, and graphical effects. Others, like Final Fantasy 8 Remastered, lose the ability to run at separate frame rates for different elements simultaneously. That’s likely a major reason why Metal Gear Solid 4 is already so hard to emulate and make a modern port of.
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Save File Detection
It’s not impossible to do nowadays by any means, but the function and the intent of the system is entirely different. With many early games, especially around the creation of memory cards, many games implemented the ability to detect save data from other games and import it, giving you unique scenes and carrying over choices and such.
However, games take a damn long time to make now. Dragon Age is a great example, with two support direct save file import, and then Inquisition having to rely on an online service, and then Veilguard having to forgo it entirely. It’s hard to import a save file when the distance between games is just so damn long, and different systems might save data completely differently.
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