Comment by coopierez
4 months ago
I'm stunned so many people here can remember details as fine as the colour grading of a film. I couldn't remember specifics like that from 6 months ago, let alone 30 years ago when I was a child and wouldn't have had the thought to watch for cinematographic touches.
Side node - I wonder if it's a millenial thing that our memories are worse due to modern technology, or perhaps we are more aware of false memories due to the sheer availability of information like this blog post.
I doubt many people 'remember' this to any significant extent, but there are probably many cases of media giving the 'wrong' vibe with a new release, and you just assume it's because you've gotten older, but then when you get access to the original you experienced, the 'good' vibe is back, and you can easily compare between the two.
Although some people do infact remember the differences, but I'd guess a lot of those incidents are caused by people experiencing them in fairly quick succession. It's one thing to remember the difference between a DVD 20 years ago and a blu-ray you only watched today, and another to watch a DVD 15 years ago and a blu-ray 14 years ago.
At least for me it's not so much details like color grading over the entire film, it's more like a specific scene got burned into memory. Movie looks pretty much fine until reaching that scene and it's so different it's like something got shaken loose and you start to see the larger issues.
For an example people here might be more familiar with, it's like how you can't even see bad kerning until you learn what it is, then start to notice it a lot more.
I am not a huge gamer - maybe a dozen hours a year. But I feel that, say, Mario responds differently to controls in an emulator than how I remember Mario responding on an NES with a CRT.
But I was never very good, and it has been decades, so I don't know how much of this is just poor memory - I actually don't think I'm good enough/play enough that the latency of modern input/displays makes a difference at my level.
I would love to try both side-by-side to see if I could pick out the difference in latency/responsiveness.
I've played Mario in emulators where I could play just fine, and others where I kept falling down holes and such on friggin' level 1, which at times I could probably have beaten literally blindfolded, and had a hard time progressing at all. The latter might not (or, if extremely bad, might) be laggy enough for me to be able to tell you by looking, but plainly the feel is off enough to be a problem.
I find a good test is Punch Out!!! If it's much trouble at all for me to reach at least Great Tiger, the latency is really bad (even if I couldn't tell you just by looking). If I can get to Great Tiger without much trouble but struggle to do much damage to him before getting taken out, the latency's still unacceptably high for some games, but not totally awful.
Another good one's High Speed. If I can't land the final multi ball shot at least a decent percentage of the time (the game pauses the ball a couple times while police chatter plays, when you're set up for a multi ball, and after the last pause you can land the shot to initiate multi ball immediately and skip all the flashing-lights-and-sirens crap if you're very precise with your timing, it's like very-small number of milliseconds after the ball resumes its motion) then the latency is high enough to affect gameplay.
If I can land that shot at least 60-70% of the time, and if I can reach Bald Bull in Punch Out!!!, then probably any trouble I have in other games is my own damn fault :-)
I suppose as I age further these tests will become kinda useless for me, because my reflexes will be too shot for me to ever do well at these no matter how many hours of practice I've had over the decades :-(
Anyway, even in the best case you're always going to have worse display and input latency on a digital screen with a digital video pipeline and USB controllers than an early console hooked up over composite or component to a CRT. I've found it's low enough (even on mediocre TVs, provided they have a "game mode", and those are a ton worse than most PC monitors) for me not to mind much if the emulation itself is extremely snappy and is adding practically no extra latency, and there are no severe problems with the software side of the video & input pipelines, but otherwise... it can make some already-tough games unplayably hard in a hurry.
I do wonder about the experience of people who try these games for the first time in an emulator. They'll come to the game with no built-in way to tell if they keep slipping off ledges because the latency's like six frames instead of the ~ one it was originally, or because they just suck at it.
Different people just remember different things. I bet most people don't remember either and only going "ah yes of course!" after reading this blogpost (which means they didn't remember at all).
Anecdata here, but I played Zelda Ocarina of Time on CRT when I was a child, and have since replayed it many times via emulator. The game never looked quite as good as I remembered it, but of course I chalked it up to the fact that graphics have improved by several orders of magnitude since then.
Then a few years ago I was throwing out my parent's old CRT and decided to plug in the N64 one last time. Holy crap was it like night and day. It looked exactly as I remembered it, so much more mysterious and properly blended than it does on an LCD screen.
I don't see why the same wouldn't apply to films, sometimes our memories aren't false.
They probably can't.