What is the most technologically impressive game on consoles?

What is the most technologically impressive game on consoles?

remake of accidentally deleted thread

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all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/
all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/04/making-crash-bandicoot-part-3/
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it's weird to think about, but the xbox version of half-life is more accurate to the creators vision than the currently supported PC version.

half-life 2, that is.

How so?

well, the razor train chicken moment actually works.

I am going with Pong.

I would't say most impressive, but both of these came out within a year of their console's release and were only topped by their own sequels. Prime had an insane poly count and never dropped below 60 FPS, while Rogue Leader had huge, incredibly detailed environments, vehicles, and effects while mostly staying at 60.

prime really isn't too impressive once you realize how the game sections off everything.

probably some first person Atari game or something. I doubt anything from the past 20 years even compares to stuff made back then.

Half-Life 2 does the same thing. Most games do the same thing. It's called BSP, binary-space partitioning.

I know, I've worked with BSPs for a long time. Prime does it in a very shallow way.

Even then with that sectioning off the polygons are absurdly dense, the kind of shit that would be on par with the early 7th gen titles.

By "in a shallow way" do you mean there are doors and hallways to mask loading times?

really obvious hallways doesn't help, yes. The gamecube's hardware is essentially just really good at doing very simple 3D, it can push a retard amount of polygons but the moment you bring more complicated lighting, reflections, etc. into the question it becomes a disaster. It's weaker than even the dreamcast in that regard. When it came to things like deformation, the developers of burnout dropped gamecube support after a few games because it became impossible to get good results from the hardware, while even the PS2, the weakest standing platform of the generation could do just fine.

I don't think prime is very impressive when you consider what's being done. I think it's a nice looking game but I don't think it's impressive.

I still think it holds up visually to this day, same with its sequel, so I guess I find that part impressive but I'll admit I don't know a huge amount about what the Gamecube could really do.

The first Crysis was actually ported to the PS3/X360. It uses Cryengine 3. The main difference is that the flying level & the multiplayer were cut.

I actually played the 360 port, it's ass. Frame drops all over the place and the whole game has an ugly blue tint to it that wasn't present on the PC version.

Systems like the Saturn are far more interesting to me, considering how it managed to have games like panzer dragoon (1st image) looking as good as they do on a system that handles 3D so differently (right image) that to me is impressive. Combined with the layered reflections and transparencies, there's a lot of interesting things going on there. The fact that is how developers had to work out how to do 3D on the system, and the fact that some of those 3D games still look absolutely tremendous is something else.

Interesting too is that they initially started developing Shenmue for the system, and there is footage of it in action that makes it out to be the best looking game of the generation.

Ive only played a little bit of it, but red zone seems like it would have been impressive for its time. Similarly, major havoc was probably advanced for its time too, but it's hard for me to judge the quality of vector graphics. Conceptually at least, it seems ambitious for 83.

(video of major havoc)

Battletoads had full parallax scrolling backgrounds, something the NES was thought to be impossible

Also any music Tim Follin has done

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Here is something on a system which had no hardware support for scaling, and has effects that trump the SNES' mode7 - all with no additional hardware at hand.


most breakthroughs fall into consumer hands on console first, out of necessity.

Precisely because consoles have a deliberately and needlessly outdated hardware.

There's a few games from this era that have similar stories; Eternal Darkness would've been a legendary final release on N64, but it ended up as a Gamecube cult classic instead.
Embed related (7 minutes in) has the lead developer talking about it, with links to gameplay footage in the annotations.

A lot of Mega Drive games have levels where the camera looks at a tower, with the player in the centre, and moving left or right turns the tower as the player goes up. It's a pretty cool effect. I think Gunstar Heroes and Dynamite Headdy do it.
The Conker games push their consoles pretty well. the N64 version looks like it belongs on the Gamecube, and the Xbox remake beats a lot of 360 games.

What do you mean?

Ratchet: Deadlocked put certain content at the center of the disc so it could be read faster. Insomniac and Naughty Dog did a lot of crazy stuff in their PS1 and PS2 games but I'm not knowledgeable enough to elaborate.

They wrote all their animation stuff in Assembly for Crash 1. They did a good enough job that other companies complained that Sony gave them special dev kits.

Here's your required reading.
all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/

Timesplitters 2 on Xbox

all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/04/making-crash-bandicoot-part-3/
Crash's development was insane, I don't think any other game surpasses it.


Video related

I bet this would sound amazing in stereo. Is there any more? Maybe an album by the guy?

Metal Gear Solid 2. The ice cubes alone are a game changer.

I'm sure there's more but this is all I know of.

For the NES/Famicom, I'd say Gimmick!
The interactions with the enemies and all the little details like how in the second level you can knock off the little spiky enemies and ride on their feet and push them into the water for extra points, in the same level if you get to the second boss early, you can find him sleeping with an alarm clock enemy waking him up. Or in the cave part of the third level there are these bug guys that fly into a hole and you can just ride on them and watch them go in.

Not only that, the star projectile (and a lot of other things in the game for that matter) have weight and respond to physics, which is fucking insane for a Famicom game. The graphics are also very good for the system and the game just had screens showing off how good the graphics were. It's a must-play game for the system. Also, this annotated longplay for the game is pretty good as well, shows off all the neat little details the game has, however play the game first.

Solaris and Secret Quest
Gimmick! and Kirby's Adventure
Phantasy Star and Gunstar Heroes
Karateka and Xenophobe
Faceball 2000, Pokemon, and Donkey Kong Land series
Adventure of Batman & Robin, Toy Story, and Virtua Racing
Silpheed
Metalhead, Kolibri, and Tempo
Doom and Street Fighter Alpha 2
Sapphire
Castlevania: Dracula X
Rayman
Doctor Hauzer, Need for Speed, and D
Panzer Dragoon Saga and Radiant Silvergun
Delta Force: Urban Warfare
Conker's Bad Fur Day, Perfect Dark, and Resident Evil 2
Shenmue and Dead or Alive 2
Cannon Fodder and Shantae
Driv3r and Asterix and Obelix XXL
Star Wars Rogue Squadron and Resident Evil 4
Half-Life 2 and Doom 3
Shadow of the Colossus and God of War 2
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Rise of the Tomb Raider
The Last of Us
Xenoblade Chronicles and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (shit game but it's impressive how faithful it is to the other versions)

I don't see what makes it anymore impressive than any other GBC game.

Should also mention Just Cause for the original Xbox, it looks impressively-similar to the 360 version compared to the PS2 version (which is also impressive but not as much so).

Check this shit out.

Damn I forgot that was in the game. I guess now that I think of it, I haven't seen much video footage played on the GBC.

Here's a bonus.

It means you got an underrated and wasted dub quads.

I have to go with Goldeneye, it used the analog stick and trigger well while being one of the very first games to offer different control layouts.

Since then I can't really think of anything but I haven't brought a console in over 16 years so I have probably missed some.

Years ago, an engine update to Half-Life 2 broke several scripts in the maps. Valve never cared to patch them.

Another glitch I remember is about the turret defense moment right before you teleport out of Nova Prospekt, it hardly spawns any combines to come at you. There used to be loads, making it a very tense situation.

mario 64

What in the fuck? Success made a Cotton like Space Harrier?

Welp

X on gameboy. 3d vector graphics

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Not really

Journey to Silius has a pretty unique sounding soundtrack because it used the nes sound chip in unconventional ways. According to wikipedia:
The result is something like a combination of an nes and a genesis.

This is brought up pretty much every time the game is mentioned, but Rollercoaster Tycoon is written almost entirely in assembly.

I love how the last part is so blatantly Nausicaa's Sea of Corruption.

my numbers said that it is true

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This pushed the console to the absolute limit

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What's so impressive about this one? How shitty they made it look?

I'll agree with this user, the most impressive results from consoles are the ones that were done well on confusing hardware. Sega and their saturn wizardry is up there, as is stuff like Jaguar Doom.


by my understanding this is an uncommon game at that

So it goes

It's not impressive, it was for some shitty Brazilian made console because they were too poor and cheap to actually import and make proper trading deals with Japan and the like.

It's literally the iphone port sapped into a shitty beaner box.

Graphically it's not all that impressive. What's impressive is how they compressed a 2 cd game into 1 cartridge. Or maybe the game didn't actually need 2 cd's, it was just kamiya being a hack like usual.

RE Degeneration for Nokia phones was far more impressive.

Gran Turismo 4 played in HD on PS2 hardware.

They made two rail shooter cotton games. Panorama and rainbow on the dreamcast. They aren't the best games and rainbow has some notable issues but they are still solid 8/10s. Plus the sheer character of any cotton game makes it at least worth trying.

You could get it running in 1080p, which the ps3 GTs didn't even do

Surprise nobody has mentioned Killzone 2 & 3

Actually the Gamecube is pretty decent for lighting and other effects. Gamecube actually has built TnL and can push many effects at once and is texturing monster with the tev units being used.

The main reasons the burnout developers stopped developing on the gamecube was mostly sales and disk space reasons. Previous Burnouts sold better on PS2 and Xbox and the Gamecube versions looked and ran better than the PS2 versions also.

1080i. No PS2 game runs in 1080p, and interlaced images on anything but a CRT are a disaster, so you'd need a high end CRT monitor to get GT4 to look as good as possible.


killzone 2 is famous for it's tremendously poor framerate. It is still visually impressive, but I don't think the game is good enough to be worth it.


burnout developers attributed the discontinuation of GC support to be performance related, although the platform sales were likely motivation to not seek a solution to the issues.

The PS2 hardware is polygon pushing monster, but it sucks in texturing, image quality, and hardware effects. However with good developers you can bruteforce various effects that come free on the Xbox and Gamecube and still get good results.

Actually GT4 isn't 1080p but 1080i with the resolution being 640x1080i.

yes, the PS2 hardware has been described in some interesting ways, and has some very bizarre rendering techniques such as field based rendering which took explicit advantage of 480i output (which also makes me cringe when people emulate everything in a progressive resolution, even the games that don't support it because I can see the artifacts as clear as day.) I've heard people describe it as an ultra charged PS1, and in a sense it's similar - The PS1's design had more in common with modern system architecture than its competition did - and even then I see it as an interesting bridging point between the native 480p dreamcast, the 480i N64 (well, 480i sometimes) and the strong 480p xbox and GC.

It's hard to describe, and it's an anomaly of a system with some real horsepower in there. With hardware finalized in 1998 and producing games as striking as shadow of the colossus and ico, it's really something to behold.

What made it so great is that it may not have supported many of the more advanced features being pushed natively by the Xbox and GC's APIs, but due to the way the system was designed, it often had more advanced rendering techniques pulled off on it than the competition - as seen with self shadowing and motion blur in ico and sotc, and things like the fog in silent hill 2.

Bump

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bump

Jackass the game on the ps2. Shit got ragdoll and can be set at 1080i

The problem with your list is that old games that came on cartridges had additional hardware inside to move such graphics. This is specially true for things like NES/SNES or Genesis. Gimmick has the 5B mapper with dedicated audio Doom has the Super FX 2 chip, and some games like Mario RPG have an improved SNES CPU inside, the SA1, which is pretty much a dual core setup, Virtua Racing has the insane SVP chip inside, etc.
If we remove such insane additional power, in the NES you may have something like Super Mario Bros as the winner, since it's the most impressive NROM game I can think of.

RE7 was massively impressive from a graphical and technological standpoint.

Also Rouge Leader because that shit looked like an era-appropriate PC game and ran like melted butter

did it finally reach the level of FEAR?

makes me giggle every time. "nintendo is jewing you on extra chips" "looks we can chips too!"

bump

Zero Tolerance for the Genesis. Possibly the first FPS that was original and exclusive to a console rather than a port. Very impressive, as the system was not designed with 3D in mind at all.

Let's not forget the Brazilian Duke Nukem 3D port.