If you’ve ever played the arcade classic Space Invaders, you must have noticed those pesky aliens coming at you notably faster as the game goes on. This wasn’t an intentional part of the game at first, but actually became a core piece of its design. According to an interview with creator Toshihiro Nishikado, the hardware only allowed him to move one Invader every 1/60 second. Functionally, this meant that the set speed of the aliens would get faster as less of them appeared on screen. What audiences perceived as the game speeding up to make it more challenging was actually the game’s inherent slowdown fading as fewer enemies were eating up the game’s hardware restrictions. Now it’s an iconic part of gaming history.

(via 1UP)

This is absolutely amazing to me. It is crazy to think of something so integral to the gameplay of this and future games was a prouct of a hardware limitation. Although I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing a lot lately. Games live firmly within the hardware they are written for and played on.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band owe some of their difficulty the their hardware. No, I’m not talking about the parade of shoddy peripherals, I’m actually referring to the fabled strum limit allegedly introduced as an artifact of the NTSC encoding scheme common to US released games and game consoles. NTSC has a lower input per second limit than the European PAL system and this can get in the way when you are attempting to strum Trogdor, at over 17 notes per second.

What about when you attempt to take a game across not just regions but across generations? Recently there has been an uproar about how poorly the Silent Hill franchise (originally released on Sony’s Playstation 2) was updated for the 2012 release of Silent Hill HD Collection. As the forefather of the survival horror genre, Silent Hill lead with atmosphere. It is the atmosphere that is poorly recrated on the HD “update”. Check out the series of links on this detailed review, specifically the fog wall.

Like the radio, the fog is iconic to Silent Hill and it helps define the game’s aesthetic, but in Collection the fog has been downgraded to an afterthought. Originally the fog served a dual purpose: to establish atmosphere and hide imperfections in the rendering of the game environment. But now it does neither. The fog line is incredibly stark as you are traveling outdoors and at times it looked like a large white wall of fog was racing away from James. It didn’t look natural. In fact, one of the scariest elements of the game has been turned into a cartoonish caricature. To be fair: the mechanics of the fog may act the same way in the original but, unlike Collection, there’s a whole lot of fog in that game to mask the wall. Fog completely fills the screen in the original game, making it extremely difficult to see buildings, monsters and objects not directly in front of you – but now the fog is only a minor inconvenience.

High def upgrades isn’t just for games. Blu-ray is home to hundreds of cleaned up classics. Remastering can reduce grain, improve contrast, and sharpen audio tracks. But is that something we should always want? Many great directors embraced their limitations to provide a rich experience. Would Texas Chainsaw Massacre have the same effect if rendered in full HD?

What about 3D remakes? Or color? Or even sound? The Artist just won the Oscar for best picture without any of these things. I think Ian Malcom put it best when he said “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

The fictional Jurassic Park character is right. And that was just hours before “remakes” tore his new friends into little pieces.

Modern Warfare 3 Sniping Multikills

this is my gameplay. my first double is a triple. my second double is five seconds later. not too shabby

Battlefield 3 Live Action Trailer

“Is it real or is it Battlefield?”

brilliant tv spot