Old stuff that is still visually impressive to you.

Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance on PS2, the water physics, it's better than most AAA games made today.


Soul Calibur katas on Dreamcast, still looks amazing


Going further back….

Shadow of the Beast on Amiga 500. That parallax scroll was legendary combined with the colorful graphics.


The Last Ninja on C64. At the time it was above everything else, graphics, music, the isometric perspective and how you walked behind things, controls were bizarrely complex too for just 8 way digital stick and a button.
 
How Capcom managed to accomplish this on the Playstation 1:

mega-man-mega-man-legends2.gif

megaman-legends.gif


and how they managed to accomplish this on the 3DS:

JGPB2p3.gif

tumblr_mneq67IA9Q1snzohuo2_500.gifv


Capcom had a long run through multiple generations of giving people good looking games, but for some reason were never fully in the conversation of graphical fidelity.
 
MagiusNecros said:
We are never getting another Jet Force Gemini and it makes me sad.
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I don't trust current MS to do anything worth the IP's name.

At most I think we could hope for an indie to make some kind of spiritual successor, that would be neat.
 
FXUaXEy.jpeg


I would say any game with cell shaded graphics from back in the day looks good today. any 3d game that tried to push technology back in the day ... not so much.

there is a reason why nintendo games looks good to this day. due to its cartoonish art style. it kinda doesn't get old etc.
 
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March Climber said:
Why not? A space faring PG-rated shooter starring two characters with blue hair in a toon-like graphical style, would be an easy assignment for them, no?
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Let's see how Perfect Dark ends up being before we decide on what's easy or not for them.
 
March Climber said:
You wouldn't need Rare for JFG. The original members are mostly gone anyway. They can choose any of their competent first party shooter devs. For example, maybe have the Gears of War guys work on this to give them a break from Gears.
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Don't think they would understand what made JFG....JFG and try to insert their realism and seriousness everywhere.

It's more of a Arcade TPS then anything else. With a lot of "Cute Violence".

But if you delve into history behind JFG and the people that worked on it you see a lot of their influence in Ratchet and Clank. Which has a lot of similarities in it's design.
 
Cakeboxer said:
Not super old, but i'm still impressed how good Alien Isolation looked on the 360:
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One of two (the other being Remember Me) that implemented PBR (physically based rendering), also one of the first to do it. Basically how games lighting and shading models are done today.

It did come with a cost though. Because as wonderful as the game runs on PC and on PS4/XBO, it runs at 1120x720 on X360 and PS3 gets an even lower 960x720. What's more, 30 FPS is all but guaranteed.

Nevertheless, its an amazing visual showcase and basically an even bigger next-gen now title than Crysis 3 was back in the day, in hindsight.

MagiusNecros said:
Good Combat





Speaking of Alien

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Blade was visually and technically so far ahead back in its day. From a physics model unmatched till HL2 came along to stencil shadows before Doom 3, and doing it all in first person and without using shader-based hardware.

Since this is a fun topic for me, here is my list:
  • - Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens - Tech demo
  • - Isle Of Morg - Tech demo
  • - Outcast - PC - Paradise Engine - This game can legit look like a low res X360 title. Bump mapping, sun shafts, depth of field...
  • - Decay
  • - Trapped 2 (Amiga) - PSX level visuals with dynamic colored lighting on hardware better suited for 2.
  • - Mekton - SGI - A 1995 shooter that looked very much like Shogo, but 3 years prior
  • - Heavy Gear II - Darkside Engine
  • - Rebel Moon/Rebel Moon Rising - DOS with colored lighting, years before Unreal
  • - Swat: Global Strike Team - PC, Xbox, PS2 - Okre Engine - Its baked lighting is all too reminiscent of Mirror's Edge
  • - Severance: Blade of Darkness - Blade Engine - stencil shadows, all on DX7 and Voodoo hardware
  • - Deadlight - PS2 - As close to Doom 3 on PS2 one could get.
  • - Transformers Armada: Prelude to Energon (PS2) - Incredible draw distance and forest rendering giving Far Cry a run for its money.
  • - Gift - PC, PS2 - Cactus Engine - 2000 - First game to have stencil shadows, physics, extensive lightmap system, environment mapping and water reflections, all on DX7 and Voodoo hardware and on PS2
  • - Jurassic Park: Trespasser - I mean, duh...
  • - Montezuma's Return - PC - Uvision Engine - DOS and Windows - Phong shading, bump mapping. Pretty impressive for 1997.
  • - Lego Island - PC - Omni Engine - 1997, first First person open world, N64 like visuals, DirectX Retained Mode, DX5 - by Mindscape
  • - Antiplanet - PC - Virtualray Engine - by Virtualray.ru - First (2002-2004) realtime RT FPS
  • - Antiplanet 2 - PC - Virtualray Engine - real time raytracing, only spheres (2009)
  • - Antiplanet Reflections - PC - Virtualray Engine, raytracing, artsy, fractals. Infinite reflections in addition to dynamic whole scene animation, illumination and shadows. And rendering is performed on GPU using CUDA. Latest version (2010-2013)
  • - Light Lands - PC - Raydiant++ Engine - by Albertoven, game two of the Hidden History Saga, a pathtraced FP puzzle game with coder colors, looks like Antiplanet + Broken Reality + Reflect. A interactive Monte Carlo implementation - https://albertoven.com/2018/08/29/light-lands/ - ''Light Lands is a peaceful retro inspired exploration and puzzle bedroom coder GAME for PC with procedural algebraic visuals and sounds. Light Lands has CPU pathtraced (raytraced) interactive spectral graphics with full scene realtime global illumination on unlimited dynamic surface/volumetric lights and includes a benchmark option.''
  • - Yedoma Globula - PC - Modified Urho 3D Engine - First person game playing in a fractal world, looks amazing, a bit like the old Antiplanet games (Antiplanet, Antiplanet 2 and Antiplanet Reflections) from Virtualray, By Bananaft.
  • - King's Quest: Mask Of Eternity - Stencil shadows
 
MagiusNecros said:
Don't think they would understand what made JFG....JFG and try to insert their realism and seriousness everywhere.

It's more of a Arcade TPS then anything else. With a lot of "Cute Violence".

But if you delve into history behind JFG and the people that worked on it you see a lot of their influence in Ratchet and Clank. Which has a lot of similarities in it's design.
Click to expand...
I think there's a misunderstanding here. I wasn't advocating for the Gears guys to take it so that they can apply realism to it. I was saying as an example you could give it to them so that they can try something vastly different than what they are normally assigned to do, while using their expertise on shooters to make sure it plays well.

If I were on a team who had to make gritty shooters for over a decade and my publisher suddenly asked our team to make a cutesy, arcadey TPS, I would feel excited to take the opportunity to work on something that isn't the typical gritty shooter.
 
protonion said:
25 years ago Kojima and his team blew gamers and the industry away with the mgs2 reveal.
This game will never age.


JSPidNf.gif
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Agreed. For me the idea of possible MGS2 remake just feels wrong. The graphics and art direction are timeless in that. I have no problem with 3 getting a remake.
 
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I played through Resident Evil 5 on PC with my girlfriend in split screen co op last year and was constantly impressed how good that game still looks.
 
kevboard said:
early bumpmapping and parallax mapping.

I could still boot up Perfect Dark Zero or Kameo and stare at their wall and ground textures. the amount of 3D detail they were able to fake with textures only was kinda insane at the time. and many surfaces still hold up today.

the brickwork in the nightclub level in Perfect Dark Zero, right at the start near the dock, still looks amazing and super detailed for a 360 game... a launch game no less.

I was absolutely hypnotized by these textures when I got my 360 at launch on 2005... I literally walked around staring at walls, floors, roads...


edit: like look at these!!
Iazdiwp.jpeg

and that's only a still shot. the really impressive part is how three-dimensional they look in motion.
Click to expand...


also, PDZ needs a freaking remaster already. fix the cover system, fix the aiming controls, fix the disjointed art style a bit, and you got an actually good game there.
 
Liopleurodon said:
Metal Gear Solid 2

Metal Gear Ray catches the falling Harrier:



Final Fantasy IX

Atomos destroys Lindblum:



Zone of the Enders 2

Anubis boss.

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Came to post MGS2, and OP got it.

Game is timeless.

Same with Ninja Gaiden 1 from the master collection. Still looks great.

It'd be a cop out to list pixel art games because those truly are timeless like Chrono trigger. 3D games age with each generation dramatically.
 
kevboard said:
early bumpmapping and parallax mapping.

I could still boot up Perfect Dark Zero or Kameo and stare at their wall and ground textures. the amount of 3D detail they were able to fake with textures only was kinda insane at the time. and many surfaces still hold up today.

the brickwork in the nightclub level in Perfect Dark Zero, right at the start near the dock, still looks amazing and super detailed for a 360 game... a launch game no less.

I was absolutely hypnotized by these textures when I got my 360 at launch on 2005... I literally walked around staring at walls, floors, roads...


edit: like look at these!!
Iazdiwp.jpeg

and that's only a still shot. the really impressive part is how three-dimensional they look in motion.
Click to expand...
PDZ had a phenomenal look. Very plasticky, but that was the charm. It was essentially a CG cartoon of the late-90's era, only in real-time - and that alone was an impressive thing.

Too bad the game itself was significantly less impressive. Clearly, they were encouraged to focus exhaustively on visual presentation above all else. And it certainly shows. They could have at *least* kept the free-aim.

Honestly, my wife and I are of the same belief that visual presentation hasn't really evolved that much in the past decade. We discuss it all the time, whenever we boot up some old game or another. Some things are clearly superior, such as how human models are presented, but environmental details aren't usually that much better. In some ways, graphics have devolved - like with temporal anti-aliasing. That right there's a disease.

Boot up an ancient, crusty game like The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, for example. That game's interiors look amazing a million years later.
 
Bloodborne (PS4). I don't care what anyone says, the game is perfectly playable at 30fps and still looks great to this day thanks to the superb art direction.

That said, playing it in higher image quality and fps via shadps4 is 🔥🔥🔥.
 
A Link To The Past has such a clean, simple art style that it still looks gorgeous in motion to me. There's so much left to the imagination in terms of negative space sometimes.

It just looks great and clean.
 
The opening to Bioshock blew me away the first time I played it. After the plane crashes into the ocean, I thought the game was still in the middle of a cutscene.

Everything leading up to the first encounter with a splicer (including entering Rapture) was amazing.

 
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Also OP already got it - but yes, Mega Man Legends (both 1 2 and Tron Bonne) - still look good today. Most cell shaded games still hold up imo.
 
//DEVIL// said:
FXUaXEy.jpeg


I would say any game with cell shaded graphics from back in the day looks good today. any 3d game that tried to push technology back in the day ... not so much.

there is a reason why nintendo games looks good to this day. due to its cartoonish art style. it kinda doesn't get old etc.
Click to expand...
Came here to say something similar. Jet Set Radio and Future are the best looking games of all times to me strictly because that style forces you into a corner to max it out.
 
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