Thirith on 14/6/2018 at 12:43
I was wondering: which games that have come out during the last few years would have been possible on the 8-bit and 16-bit computers and consoles of the childhood of the older ones of us, without losing most of what made them what they are? There's obviously a market for games catering to nostalgia for the 8-bit/16-bit days, but could the games catering to this have been programmed for the hardware that existed back then? Would recentish platformers such as Owlboy been feasible, with minor changes, on an Amiga? Would the latest Street Fighter have been possible, though with simpler graphics, on a SNES or Sega Mega Drive/Genesis?
Sulphur on 14/6/2018 at 13:26
Hmm. Being pedantic, I have to point out that the GPUs aren't necessarily what's being referred to with 32/64-bit, that usually means the CPU architecture in question and related operational capacity/capability. GPUs don't really figure into that space since they're weird and have separate cores that do all sorts of things (while probably working with 32-bit or even 64-bit integer lengths), variable memory bus widths (128 to 256 to even 512-bit), and more technical stuff than anyone's probably interested in.
Anyway, keeping in mind we got the likes of Flashback and Another World on Amiga, Owlboy definitely would have been feasible back in the day, but with a tinny digitised soundtrack replacing its orchestral swells. Hyper Light Drifter in its original 30 fps glory as well seems like something from a lost age. And y'know, even though Rayman Legends looks and plays like a modern-day cartoon, the gameplay and musical conceit really hasn't changed all that much since Rayman's original PC release.
So to answer the question, if you simplify things enough, you could get any current-day game into an 8-bit or 16-bit version easily without losing the flavour. The demake scene is exactly that. (It gave us the timeless Soundless Mountain, for example.)
What current-day processing has given you is extremely high fidelity in asset instances, physical simulation, and graphical representation that is completely irreplaceable. Things would be decidedly more abstract otherwise, falling back to text or implying heavier beats through simpler, symbolic representation. We used our imaginations and the emotional cues from the soundtrack to fill in the blanks with scenes from the end of Loom, for instance, but we don't need to do that when looking at Senua's face while she struggles with her demons in Hellblade.
Thirith on 14/6/2018 at 13:36
Ah ha! I counter your pedantry with my intentional syntactic vagueness! The title is meant as ((32-bit) or (64-bit)) and (modern GPUs)! :cheeky:
Anyway, nice answer! I guess my question is partly about how much you can simplify things before a game turns into something fundamentally different. For instance, I can imagine a demake of the recent Hitman, but I'm not sure it would feel anything like Hitman. Same with Dishonored or Assassin's Creed Origins. On the whole, everything that allows the player to navigate intricate 3d environments would change into something very different when you go 3d-->2d. I don't want to define the term "immersion", but the kind of immersion you get changes with representation, I think.
Sulphur on 14/6/2018 at 13:59
Heh. All right, that's a mostly acceptable use of vagueness.
Compressing 3D navigation to 2D pathing does of course change the feel of the game, but there's nothing mechanically in any of those that couldn't conceivably be replicated in a 2D space. AssCreed would feel bloody weird unless it was made a platformer or had an isometric view, of course.
henke on 14/6/2018 at 16:10
The first thing that came to mind was this Witness NES demake.
[video=youtube;i8R9gn_VWo4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8R9gn_VWo4[/video]
Some of The Witness' later puzzles that incorporate your surroundings and perspective might not work, but for the most part this would've made a kick-ass NES game.
Of course there are tons of recent platformers and mobile games that would've worked great, but it's fun to think of the games that bring fresh ideas to the table, and how they theoretically could've been made 30 years ago. If Subset Games had been around then and made FTL and Into The Breach for the Amiga 500 they probably would've looked and played quite identical to how they do now. Invisible Inc. as well. Her Story could've been an early CD-ROM game, tho with a ton of loading and low-res videos. Night In The Woods could've been made 30 years ago, if anyone had figured out that there might be a market for platfomers that are all about the story and not at all about the platforming.
Pyrian on 14/6/2018 at 16:21
Some of the larger RPG's are probably just too big to fit into really old systems.
I'm still pretty amazed at the tech that made Total War function at all in 2000. I tried to make a version a few years later (in C++). Not easy.
Thirith on 14/6/2018 at 16:55
I'm surprised that Ultima VI was doable on C64. Apparently it was horrible to play, with the player swapping disks most of the time they were playing, but still...
Pyrian on 14/6/2018 at 20:43
Quote Posted by Thirith
I'm surprised that
Ultima VI was doable on C64. Apparently it was horrible to play, with the player swapping disks most of the time they were playing, but still...
Well... Apparently there were a lot of features removed just to get it to that point, too. Weird that they ported it to the Commodore 64 but not the Apple ][ (which was the
primary platform for Ultimas I through V).
heywood on 14/6/2018 at 21:57
It's hard for me to imagine stealth games on those old platforms.
