#oneaday Day 860: Perfect Imperfection

PC players are mad that the new version of Nier Replicant doesn't run properly at 144Hz and doesn't support 21:9 ultrawide displays, just like they're mad at every other console-first game that has had a questionable port to PC.

Meanwhile, I'm over here having deliberately picked up an Xbox 360 copy of Oblivion to revisit it after enjoying Amelia Watson's recent streams so much — safe in the knowledge that yes, it is indeed the inferior version to the PC release, but I (1) like it more and (2) didn't need to do anything special to make it run.

There are numerous reasons for (1). Firstly and most simply is that the first time I played Oblivion, it was on Xbox 360, and it was gobsmacking at the time. It was one of the first games you could boot up and feel like we'd taken a significant step forward in terms of gaming tech. I have fond memories of my time spent playing the Xbox 360 version, and thus revisiting the game on Xbox 360 just made the most sense for me — because it would provide the same experience I once had.

There are doubtless people out there who would argue that I "should" want the "definitive" experience from a game like Oblivion, but I've never really felt that way. When looking back on stuff like this, I like to remember how it existed when it was current and enjoy it as I enjoyed it back then. In that regard, Oblivion is still an impressive game many years after its original release — particularly when you regard how early in the Xbox 360's life it came out.

This is true for stuff that goes further back, too. I'm not into emulating PS1, PS2, Gamecube, Wii and the like at super high resolution and full widescreen support — because again, that's not how I remember those games. On top of that, I tend to find the bigger the disparity between the original release date of a game and the tech you're running to make it look its "best", the more absurd a game looks. A lot of PS1 games deliberately worked within the constraints of the system's low resolution and limited polygon count, for example, and buffing those up to HD resolutions just looks weird to me.

"Oh, but you can mod PC ga–" Don't care. Do not care. Actually, that's not 100% true; I do care when it comes to older stuff like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D — the Castlevania Total Conversion for Doom was amazing — but the more recent a game is, the less likely I am to want to piss around with mods for it. A friend of mine started up a Minecraft server recently; he promptly installed literally 800 mods on it which caused the game clients to take more than ten minutes to load the game and my enthusiasm for ever playing it completely evaporated.

Again, this ties in somewhat with wanting to experience the game as it was originally created, and as I remember it. The jank is part of the Elder Scrolls experience, and modding everything "broken" out of it means it's not really Oblivion any more. I'm not interested in that, just as I'm not interested in modding characters into Smash, modding nude patches into games with pretty ladies or indeed pretty much anything today's mod scene comes up with. This isn't to say I don't respect the amazing work modders do under often difficult circumstances — it's just not how I'm interested in experiencing my games.

So I think my tastes in this regard can safely be summed up as a pursuit of imperfection. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact I grew up with an Atari ST, a system that usually came off worst against its main rival the Amiga when it came to games, and thus I've always had a certain inherent tolerance for "imperfect" versions of games.

But also, I see arguments about frame rates on Twitter when you could be talking about infinitely more interesting things and I just think… yeah, I'm happy how I am, thanks.