What is the definition of 'retro' to you?

[fmsynthetic]

Speaking of music I remembered that one meme talking how radio stations often say: "The best musics of the 80's, the 90's and today" while it is lasting over two decades.

View attachment 5329
Is this actually telling us that we culturally stagnated in the last two decades?

The 90s were (barely) the last culturally distinct decade, for a variety of reasons I won't go into here.

 

[starseeker300]

Is this actually telling us that we culturally stagnated in the last two decades?

Not just stagnated, but declining

 

[ATenderLad]

Speaking of music I remembered that one meme talking how radio stations often say: "The best musics of the 80's, the 90's and today" while it is lasting over two decades.

View attachment 5329
Is this actually telling us that we culturally stagnated in the last two decades?

Of course, 98 FM only presents peer-reviewed data.

 

[Gorse]

The 90s were (barely) the last culturally distinct decade, for a variety of reasons I won't go into here.

You know, people say this, but I can absolutely differentiate between 2000s (grim and gritty Iraq war stuff, Superflat, Frutiger Aero, etc.) and 2010s culture (coffee-shop hipsterism, CalArts bean-mouths, sex-negative third-wave feminism, etc.), and I’m starting to do so with 2020s culture, too (anime going fully mainstream, return of woman-fronted pop acts, post-Corporate Memphis, etc.). Give it a few more years and I’ll bet we’ll see the last few decades just as distinctly as the 80s and 90s.

CALLING IT NOW: Anime is going to be seen as a trend of the 2020s, like tie-dye was in the ‘70s. Wouldn’t that be good?

 

[Bobmeboi]

in guess I'd have to say ps3 and pass

 

[Yankee]

Retro is 4:3 and has a strict polygon limit!

 

[RebelofDaNeonGod]

20 years is a good cut off of what is retro and what isn't. A child can go through all of Elementary, Middle and High school in that span of time. So anything within or before that time frame would be retro.

 

[Inkingsama]

There is no way people in 2037 will look at fortnite and say "yep, that's a retro game".

 

[ATenderLad]

There is no way people in 2037 will look at fortnite and say "yep, that's a retro game".

Of course not, they'll be advertising an updated port for the PS7.

 

[Inkingsama]

Of course not, they'll be advertising an updated port for the PS7.

It's somewhat of a bummer to think that maybe we won't see another technological jump comparable to the 4th gen to the 5th and from the 5th to the 6th.

 

[ATenderLad]

It's somewhat of a bummer to think that maybe we won't see another technological jump comparable to the 4th gen to the 5th and from the 5th to the 6th.

True, but they will get better. The bottleneck is kind of our own eyes, we're already hitting limits in fidelity to what we can observe.

8K is indistuingishable from 4K, unless you get right up to a screen that's at least 70+ inches or so. Going from 60 to 120 FPS is something not everyone is sensitive to, and can look identical. (My mother can't tell when the motion smoothing feature on her television is on, for example, and it drives me up a wall.)

The cool innovations will probably be in storage, memory bandwidth and the speed of streaming resources, and constant miniaturization leading to more capable handheld devices especially.

Raytracing is a pretty cool visual innovation, actually, but it's still really resource-intensive, and has to be used intelligently. Natural-ish illumination everywhere doesn't look better than a planned scene with light and shadows, hence why lighting is so important to movies and TV. (Or it used to be, but that's a different conversation.)

 

[Ikagura]

motion smoothing feature

I'm changing subject but motion smoothing looks awful imo. Especially for 2D animation.

There is no way people in 2037 will look at fortnite and say "yep, that's a retro game".

That's the issue with GAAS/Always Online games. Even WoW is still pretty "modern" despite being over 20 years.

Although BotW wouldn't be considered that modern in this year if the series evolved even further.

 

[Happppppp]

I'm changing subject but motion smoothing looks awful imo. Especially for 2D animation.


That's the issue with GAAS/Always Online games. Even WoW is still pretty "modern" despite being over 20 years.

Although BotW wouldn't be considered that modern in this year if the series evolved even further.

I think Retro Makes the most sense with Technological Leaps Via Consoles and PC Hardware. We've honestly Stagnated in Hardware in comparison to the 5th gen to the 6th gen and the 6th to the 7th, the real trouble began when going from 8th to 9th, not much of a jump in terms of tech. Sure Ray Tracing as a technology and AI Upscaling exists, but tbh it's not all that impressive. Most games nowadays don't look any different than an 8th Gen Game or in some instances look worse.

 

[SpectreOverflow]

As of right now, everything before the Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
I don't feel right considering the latter two as "retro" because they're both HD consoles and got some modern releases despite their age.

Personally I consider "retro" to be games/platforms I grew up with

If this were the case, would I consider the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS to be retro? xD They are absolutely not by today's standards

 

[newageretrohippie]

Nightmare inducement: you now realize the Xbox 360 is 19 years old.

Giggidy

 

[Tetronomicon]

TLDR: The shift from retro to modern was the 2000s. The full separation between "modern" and "retrogaming" was in full swing by the 2010s. Read on for how I understood it.

Its hard to say where it truly begins and ends. But if I had to make a hard cutoff, it would be the 7th console generation/Windows Vista and beyond. A soft cutoff would be the 6th console generation/Windows XP era.

In both these examples, this is where standardization became a thing more so than previous eras. While there were some intesting ideas being floated in the 6th/XP era, the 5th generation feels like the last truly experimental era of gaming (mostly due to the proliferation of 3D). Similarly, PC gaming in the Win9X era was the last time that console and PC gaming felt like two distinct platforms.

It was also the last era where game input peripherals were designed for truly separate categories in mind (controllers for consoles and keyboard/mouse for PC). These days you have hardware more or less designed to be interchangable with each other. Think reaction-based gaming on PC (ideally suited for controller) and AOE4 on the Xbox Series console (which is basically designed for the KB/M support the console now has). This isn't to say there wasn't ever any crossover beforehand (pre-USB PC controllers and RTS console ports). But moreso when they were streamlined into each other.

Resolution wise things also changed. WinXP onwards marked when 800x600 (SVGA) started to standardize. Prior to that, 640x480 (VGA) was the main resolution we went with. The 6th generation was also the era that 480P started to become the standard (away from the rather weird trick of splitting 480i into 240P). By the next era, 1024x768 (XGA) started to become the norm on PC just as 1280x720 (720P) became the standard on consoles. It was also when fully digital output (HDMI/DisplayPort) was starting to become the primary way we connected to our screens (compared to composite/component RCA connectors for TV and VGA/DVI D-Sub connectors for PC). The shift from CRTs/Tube TVs to LCD/flat screens started with said outputs as well.

If the 6th/XP era wasn't the last time we saw these stark difference, the 7th/Vista era was when they truly started taking the course they have been taking since.

(I may add/edit more if I can think of any other big differences).

 

[VanDine]

It's still weird for me to picture PS2 as retro, let alone PS3, and its not at all what I imagine when people say that word. It requires some mental gymnastics but PS2 is the absolute limit of what I'm willing to call retro.
At that point better to just call it by the generation.

 

[rosemarymenace]

for me anything made before the advent of online play in the 2000s would be definitely retro, but I also wouldn't consider a lot of later releases from the PS2, Gamecube, Xbox to really be "retro", but it also depends on the context I guess, like I wouldn't consider Need for Speed Most Wanted to be retro because almost all of the features and gameplay that game had are still (to an extent) being iterated on by the current games in the series and the same design blueprint was used by a lot of "modern" titles

 

[Bakuma1997]

Why Bother calling something modern when everything will be Retro when the Sun explodes and we all become a footnote in this apathetic universe?

Jk, i picked 2

 

[Zemus]

Before the PS1. Almost picked the option below that, but I apparently have an internal definition as well.

As for "new games", probably anything since 2015.

Post automatically merged: Dec 29, 2024

You know, people say this, but I can absolutely differentiate between 2000s (grim and gritty Iraq war stuff, Superflat, Frutiger Aero, etc.) and 2010s culture (coffee-shop hipsterism, CalArts bean-mouths, sex-negative third-wave feminism, etc.), and I’m starting to do so with 2020s culture, too (anime going fully mainstream, return of woman-fronted pop acts, post-Corporate Memphis, etc.). Give it a few more years and I’ll bet we’ll see the last few decades just as distinctly as the 80s and 90s.

CALLING IT NOW: Anime is going to be seen as a trend of the 2020s, like tie-dye was in the ‘70s. Wouldn’t that be good?

I suspect I see the 90s as the last decade with discernible mainstream culture because I never paid much attention to it in general. So I can point to a thing or two as a "90s symbol" or "2000s symbol", but that's about it. Thanks for reminding us not to get TOO stuck in the past!

 

[ATenderLad]

Just a thought, the gap between now and the PS4 release is as large as the gap between the release dates of the Gamecube and the SNES.

 

[daratmp+wxqvs]

Just a thought, the gap between now and the PS4 release is as large as the gap between the release dates of the Gamecube and the SNES.

here's a cool timeline
https://huguesjohnson.com/features/timeline/timeline-full.png:

 

[artema]

for me, retro means that the game was not created with online on mind. the last console i consider retro is wii.

 

[Zemus]

Just a thought, the gap between now and the PS4 release is as large as the gap between the release dates of the Gamecube and the SNES.

Now we have the PS5, and everything looks like either the PS3 or SNES!

 

[Ikagura]

Just a thought, the gap between now and the PS4 release is as large as the gap between the release dates of the Gamecube and the SNES.

Or between the Gamecube and the PS4?

Unless I messed up the dates.

Yet the difference between a PS3 and a PS5 is still largely less noticeable than between the SNES and the Gamecube...

For me, retro means that the game was not created with online on mind. the last console i consider retro is Wii.

Wait, there were MMOs in the 90's and even some games like ChuChu Rocket made with Online in mind since '99.