WHEN did FPS become important!!

[Spindel]

Zach808 said:
When you were a kid with your NES and SNES, did you even know or care what FPS was? Exactly. Now, even with these classic games, there was a difference. For example, Ghosts n' Goblins on the NES. I never liked that game, mostly due to,the stiff, unresponsive controls. Replaying it later, I now understand why the controls are so unresponsive: The framerate is god-awful. Compare it to something like Super Mario Bros and its smooth 60fps. It's like night and day.

But even Super Mario Bros has it's fair share of slowdowns. And lets not forget in example Megaman 2, where Metalmans stage comes to mind in the part with the "wall driller" where the game halts to a crawl.

 

But low FPS isn't a deal braker if it's kind of consistend (including slowdowns), wildly fluctuating FPS is a bigger problem. Heck I remember being greatly helped by the slowmotion button on my NES Advantage (basically a quicktoggle of the startbutton) in games like Gradius and Lifteforce, the effect of this is the same as really low FPS but the added reaction time to bullets and obstructions etc made some parts of the games a lot easier.