Did you ever think slowdown was a feature?

I remember when playing Street of Rage 2 and Jet Grind Radio, I thought slowdown was the coolest feature. It wasn't until I met gamers in real life years later that I learned slowdown was a "bad" thing. Did anyone else every think this way?

 

Framerate drops are always a bad thing. They can break a game sometimes. I use to think it was weird until I learned about FPS drops.

 

No, I didn't play the SNES, so most of my games didn't have that feature.

(ooh burn)

 

Lol, Sonic the Hedgehog used to do it all the time if I were full o' rings.

 

I've noticed this too. Apparently overclocking the system to about 10MHz fixes this.

 

In some shooters, the slowdown makes the game easier because it gives you more time to react.

 

Well, I don't remember a console game with framerate problems that made it unplayable.
And in PC it only did when the PC couldn't run the game properly. Or a bug. Or something in the background like a scheduled anti virus.

 

Gotta hate those virus scans sometimes, especially the ones you can't cancel! I would be sitting there playing Oblivion, Skyrim, Minecraft, whatever and it would just slow down noticeably. Look in the background and a virus scan is running! It's the worst in a game like Skyrim, where it has a hard time running sometimes. It makes many parts unplayable!

 

Crazy Taxi has massive slowdown sometimes, like huge.

And I really don't remember Sonic having any slowdown, even if I got hit, only a max of 40 rings appeared. The other 60 or so just vanished.

 

For me slowdown is fine, except when that slowdown is everywhere.

For example, my first experience playing WWF Wrestlemania (Midway) is in the Super NES, which is fine, until I played all the other versions.

 

Donkey Kong 64 actually used it, instead of trying to optimise the game further, Rare made the characters move quicker. This would result in bugs though which is used by speedrunners all the time.

 

Oh Lordy, yes. It's even glitchier than Ocarina of Time, even without the slowdown-speedup stuff. If you haven't already, check out Swordlesslink's 100% playthrough of the game; it's absolutely nuts.

 

With most games, sudden slowdown tended to be obvious overload of CPU. However there is one game that I always thought was a feature: Space Invaders. I thought it was normal that it started slow and sped up as you shot more out. Turns out it's the CPU, it can't handle moving 30 sprites at once. Took me about 30 years to find out it was an unintended side effect and not deliberate.

 

Is it really? I never knew that. I always thought it was intentional too. Any way to overclock it so it runs properly?

 

It runs properly by default.

 

Try to play GTA IV on max settings without any patches.
When I still had an old, shitty PC, I put in a few hours in GTA IV at 7fps. ( I was playing at the lowest possible settings)
I can't believe I was so dedicated that I did that.

 

Seven days to die even on a mid range pc struggles, it's painful.

 

I honestly never noticed/thought much about it until I started posting on the Shmups Forums (which I don't anymore).

 

Speaking of shmups, I used to think the slowdown whenever a boss explodes in Ikaruga was a deliberate way to make their defeat seem more cinematic - little did I know it was just my poor Dreamcast struggling to keep up with all those transparent effects Treasure were throwing at it!

As for playing games at frame rates we'd now consider impossible to endure, my old PC (which I seem to recall was powered by a Cyrix MII processor, an onboard graphics chip, 4MB of RAM and a 3GB hard drive) couldn't get Half Life to run in double figures, though I never complained.

 

Seriously? I found the SNES to be one of the better systems. The NES was very prone to slowdown and have you ever played any of the Sonic games on Mega Drive? I didn't even know slowdown was a thing until I got my first (cheap) desktop PC, since most of my gaming experience was with the SNES.

Slowdown is the result of not creating the game based around the limitations of the hardware. This is not a good thing. There can be some benefits though, the famous unintentional gameplay feature of the aliens in Space Invaders getting faster after you kill a few of them for example.