@austin_walker, you and Jeff are nailing it with your writing this week. For all I know I'm probably a niche audience demographic when it comes to enjoying poking at the seams of games and consoles and seeing others doing the same, but this is some of the most simultaneously concise, informative and detailed stuff I've seen outside of a technical wiki.
Jeff, really well done. My ears always perk up when I hear you going into a brief technical aside of this nature during video features and it's great to see it expanded upon.
I am so glad this was chosen as your topic for Off The Clock this installment, Austin. It's a fascinating part of the gaming community that's done a lot for a lot of people while simultaneously being about as entertaining as playing games itself. As a fan, thanks for giving more people exposure to it, hopefully it inspires others to start speedrunning!
@danryckert, I think you and Drew would probably like to watch Escape from New York on Film & 40s at some point, given how influential it was on the Metal Gear franchise. One of my favorite John Carpenter films of the 80s as well, just in terms of story premise, music and set design.
@larmer You're not crazy, the blurriness of the cathode ray tube was intentionally used in game/technological design back then. It helps a lot with aliasing (pixelation), making animation smoother when combined with interlace, etc. Semi-related: I think it's still weird that apparently Gran Turismo 4 was designed to support early HDTVs, with 16:9 progressive scan support -- hope I can check that out some day, the fidelity of the game was something else for a PS2 game.
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