When I was 12, nothing would ever top the Dreamcast. Video game graphics had peaked, and were never going to get better than that. I mean, how could they? The games looked photo-realistic to my eyes!
When my best friend and I got the PS2 we went home and played Twisted Metal Black. I remember saying, “Bro, how much more real could it get?”
I wish he had lived long enough to see just how far the PS3 and Xbox 360 took it. Maybe my age is showing, but I’m still surprised by titles from that era sometimes.
I mean, not like I was when Drake put his hands on the wall in Uncharted 4, but still.
Back in the day, just the idea of having an entire 3d world inside a computer was absolutely mind boggling. The first time I moved a cursor and the camera rotated, the entire game world shifting, I lost my mind. I remember thinking “how did they fit this world in there? How did they build this?”
It sure looks old and dated as fuck today, but when the 3D games of the time had some 500 triangles at most and run at 10FPS, having a console managing a couple thousand triangles at 30FPS was truly mind-boggling 😀
You have reminded me of an old old memory. I don’t know where I was at the time and I was a little kid, but there was this VR headset thing with a stick. The stick was the controller for a lightsaber and the game I remember had like pterodactyls flying in it and then some ogre or something attacking you.
A lot of the industry has finally learned that investment in the most realistic graphics doesn’t offset lack of fun. I credit indie studios the most for that
Graphics have diminishing returns. Doubling the amount of polygons in the 90s meant enabling completely new kinds of games and going from blocky models you can barely distinguish from each other to something that looks like a character. Double the polygons now and the difference would be barely perceivable if at all.
The PlayStation was capable of way more than this. Even in context this is a funny screenshot since it’s a really poor demonstration of its capabilities. Also it’s just funny to take historical things out of context in general but doubly so here since it’s also a bad screen shot to show off the system.
I grew up squinting at lines and playing with the antenna on the UHF channels to try and see a boob from the Spice channel. Compared to that Lara Croft had it going on.
Hah, somewhere along the way someone made a texture hack for that game, Nude Raider haha!
Their hack was a bit tricky to install since it had to store the texture mod pack on the HDD while still allowing the game to access the CD drive, so I basically rebuilt my own ISO of the game with the modded textures included.
This is a poor screenshot to show the capabilities of the PlayStation though. The first playstation game that boggled my mind was crash bandicoot with it’s fully expressive world, but the game that really blew me away was Mario 64 shortly after with its true freedom and wide open world.
Many forget (or don’t realize) it wasn’t the graphics alone, it was the smooth 3D motion.
Before the 3D console era (and the equivalent arcade machines) most “3D” motion was scaled and stacked sprites. The rest of the time we had 2D scrolling.
It was very much like the difference between seeing a video of VR gameplay and experiencing VR yourself.
I remember seeing the screenshots in magazines (we used to update ourselves on the state of the industry with monthly or biweekly physical print media) and thinking "oh neat, but whatever..." and then I saw Battle Arena Toshinden being played at Toys'R'Us and that "oh neat" turned into "okay satan, you can have my soul for this"
We weren't blind, we knew the polygons were ugly as hell standing still, but seeing them move at 30 fps on a 25-inch CRT was downright sorcerous
Just an FYI, that Soul Edge video is it being played on a PS2 which upscaled the resolution and smoothed the textures. There was also a pretty big time gap between the Sega Y Board which came out in 1988 and the PSX which came out in 1995. While the PSX was a big jump in graphics over the previous console generation, the arcades had graphics that were similar several years earlier with the Sega Model 1 and 2.
The first PS game that really blew me away in terms of graphics was Gran Turismo. There were some other games that looked pretty good but Gran Turismo (specifically the replay feature) was head and shoulders above everything else.
Gen alpha will never grow up with demo discs from pizza hut. I feel sorry for them. I spent so much time getting good at that crash bandicoot level though I was crap at that PaRappa the Rapper game.
You probably remember that correctly. I don’t remember which demo disc it was on, but if you input a 574828 button string at the menu it played Korn’s Got the Life music video.
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