Like I’m not one of THOSE. I know higher = better with framerates.
BUT. I’m also old. And depending on when you ask me, I’ll name The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as my favourite game of all time.
The original release of that game ran at a glorious twenty frames per second. No, not thirty. No, not even twenty-four like cinema. Twenty. And sometimes it’d choke on those too!
… And yet. It never felt bad to play. Sure, it’s better at 30FPS on the 3DS remake. Or at 60FPS in the fanmade recomp port. But the 20FPS original is still absolutely playable.
Yet like.
I was playing Fallout 4, right? And when I got to Boston it started lagging in places, because, well, it’s Fallout 4. It always lags in places. The lag felt awful, like it really messed with the gamefeel. But checking the FPS counter it was at… 45.
And I’m like – Why does THIS game, at forty-five frames a second, FEEL so much more stuttery and choked up than ye olde video games felt at twenty?
Some old games are still pretty rough with their original frame rate. I recently played 4 player golden eye on an n64, and that frame rate was pretty tough to deal with. I had to retrain my brain to process that.
Out of curiosity, did you have an actual N64 hooked up to a modern TV? A lot of those old games meant to be played on a CRT will look like absolute dog shit on a modern LCD panel. Text is harder to read, it is harder to tell what a shape is supposed to be, it’s really bad.
Trinatron baby