We gave up 2D for this

Symphony of the Night got great reviews… in the last 10 years.
But if you want to get an idea of which was the usual tone of reviewers back in 1997, check this:

kultboy.com/index.php?site=t&id=7709

kultboy.com/index.php?site=t&id=10360
"Again, instead of a three-dimensional polygonal graphic, there is a pure bitmap optics that would have been possible on the SNES."

Well sotn does reuse assets from pc engine games so they aren't totally wrong

Fuck off. Virtua Fighter is a great game.

Vanillaware.

That was a console problem. Blame consoles for being shit as always.

consoles are responsible for pushing the industry forward, and PC was largely home to ugly, amateurish, low framerate games until 3d acceleration became a popular thing. Then by 1998 it was irrelevant in the hardware scene again.

Keep your reddit shit on reddit.

So you mean dumbing it down for the masses? e.g Reddit shit like (you)?

Since you're quoting me, I think you meant to respond to me. Click on the post number you mean to respond to. I don't know about reddit, but you can't edit your posts here.

Thanks for the (you)s.

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He's not samefagging, he's doing something even more cancerous by deliberately not linking other posts to prevent (you)s.

sounds retarded, who cares?

Why?

Kill yourself m8

3D is good for a lot of games but I wish they kept the majority of fighters 2D.

What are you on about, op? Why are you shitting on Atari 2600 and Virtua Fighter?

But 3D Fighters are great too.

They are, but Tekken and Virtua fighter were always 3D, I'm talking about SF and KOF.

Nigger SOTN has had 93% for the fucking PS1 on metacritic since its inception
Go fuck yourself and your revisionist tardation.

3d was really beneficial for some genres, mainly racing and simulation, and to a lesser extent first person shooters.
But the industry really should have waited until the 6th gen / DirectX 8 era before beginning to use 3d for genres such as fighting games, platformers, shoot-'em ups and rpgs. 3d had no place in those genres with the state the technology was during the 90s.
If only Sega wasn't retarded, they really should have made the Saturn into a 2d powerhouse. Instead of investing on that half-assed 3d support they could've instead added more ram (for arcade perfect Capcom and SNK ports without the need for add-on carts) and a faster (4x) cd-rom drive.

I want more 2D metroidvania games, and 2DAction-adventures. Just imagine what could be possible. High quality sprites are cool, yeah. But we've got TONNES of RAM available right now, and CPU. You could have super in depth systems, skills, upgrades and everything.
Dwarf fortress is a hyper autistic example of it. Imagine a game that had slightly better graphics (Link to the past or metroid fusion level), but had event systems, massive skill or upgrade trees, adaptive AI, and things like that.

But we don't get that shit because the budget goes to grafics, so we get fucking skyrim. 90% graphics and pretty world, 10% gameplay.

To be specific, I'm talking about DF adventure mode, which simulates a whole lot of shit you can't see.
To get an idea, DF adventure mode has emergent martial arts, because the position of the body parts of every actor are simulated. It's just not visualised by the game. www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=148015.0

Virtua Fighter 5:Final Showdown is flawless

The switch to 3D models was inevitable, sprites cost far too much money and fighting games don't pull as much money as they did before.

but DF's UI is hard and makes my brain hurt :((((((((((

3d fightan is good and 2d fightan is good, 2d fightan with 3d models is always a letdown.

Underagefag, stop spewing nonsense.

If you look closer, you will see that most of the reviews included in Metacritic were written during the PS2 era or later. But that's not exactly the reception the game had back in 1997.

Picrelated is Edge's review. Mind you, not only the score is mediocre, they didn't even give it a full page review.

If the first game is so great how come it is never played anymore? The first game was shit like many early attempts at 3D. You're all looking back with a skewed perspective because you're judging these series based on sequels.

To put it into prescriptive Mortal Kombat 3 was considered THE killer app for the 32-bit consoles. That's what was hot in the arcade at the time when it came to fightan/America. It was so important to have it on the console that Sony paid for an exclusive and there were rumors of it begin packed in with the PSX. Was it arcade perfect? No, just ask any Shang Tsung main. Instead of arcade perfect we got boned with disc access in the middle of rounds. All because the focus was on providing a 3D experience instead of focusing on what traditional games needed to run. There was this huge build up to having arcade perfect ports in the home just to have it all taken away.

Things change, I'm not saying 3D was bad. I'm saying it wasn't ready much like the VR meme and tons of good 2D projects were thrown away over night in the hopes of chasing the 3D meme. It was the start of what would eventually kill gaming a decade later.

That's for the Saturn version though, which was inferior outside of the extra areas it added and Maria mode.

On one hand
3D movement allowed for the development of new gameplay without relying on top view or isometric camera
On the other hand…
both of these pics are pretty much wine and milk in terms of how they will age

dubs of truth
everything they touch becomes gold
It's like they're Midas or something
I can only dream about a Metroid game done by them

Yep. And every time I see fucking trash like this in a game with 2D mechanics it makes me furious. 2D games deserve 2D visuals.

Symphony of the Night is a shit game that constantly gets its dick sucked because it has a nice presentation.

I hope you know RAM and CPU aren't everything. Sure, really high-fidelity games like Gunstar Heroes were held back by the systems they were made for, but brute forcing more power isn't going to make the game more interesting, it'll only run smoother.
The majority of a game relies on the effort the developers put into it. This is why Dorf Fort can get so detailed, because the developer is autisically dedicated to making a game with such scope.
Furthermore, games like Super Metroid have a thing called proper game design, where the game actually introduces you to each mechanic and system. Think about introducing a textbook full of mechanics with level design alone. Then, think about how any AAA company (even in the better years) could market a game so complex that 90% of the consumers don't have the autism to comprehend the contents of the package.
Developers, back then and especially now, are held back by the time, money, and ideas they have to make the game. Indies don't have enough money, AAA need to market correctly, and neither are good at making good games. Anything they could do, they did do, and weren't held back by the hardware in any extremely major way. Hell, many games and mechanics are made DUE to quirks and limitations in hardware.

Read the images you post, at least. They took off marks for it being a shitty version. You're right about metacritic, and you're right about SotN being shit, but your evidence is outright wrong.

Just like how OoT has a nice presentation of 20 frames per second, SotN has a nice presentation of backtracking, boring gameplay, shit level design, and grinding

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Dude, if you haven't lived the times when most magazines would shit on most 2D games released in a 32 bit console (unless it was a fighting game), while praising shitty 3D games, I can do little for you.

The 32-64 bit generation was most certainly the worst era to release a 2D game if you wanted a fair review.

3D killed video games

One thing I think was shafted by the 2d-3d transition were 2d beat-em-ups. We had plenty of 2d platformers and fighting games after the transition, but 2d beat-em-ups seem to have vanished. Which is a shame, because they were a simplistic genre that had a lot of potential to evolve and grow if handled by developers interested in fleshing them out and giving them greater mechanical depth.

Dude, all I'm saying is that you posted an image of a review of the Saturn version, it even says that it falls short compared to the PS1 original that's
If you're going to prove your point, do it with actual facts, not bullshit

This was my "proving point" post

There were more like like the reviews in there, but I don't think anyone has scanned them yet.

everyone who posts in this thread is slightly more retarded. i have become more retarded, just to tell you this.

Nice opinion, shame that there isn't a fact to be found in it.

3D movement is all that matters.

3D grafix can fuck off like the style over substance shit it only is. We need to bring back 2D.

Because it's intentionally lackluster shit with no actual evolution?

Holy mother of hipsterism

For fighting games? Kinda. But that's because they couldn't figure out hit boxes for years.
Every other genre that transitioned into 3d was pioneering into never before seen space. Most things actually improved because of it, even in fighting games.

Retard detected.

Not even close to the same.

OP is talking about muh grafix faggotry. Plenty of great games out there had actual 3D as a concept apart of their design like SM64 and DMC. The shitty outpouring of 3D games lazily in a 2D space needs to fucking stop. It makes fighting games such stagnating shit.

Hipster detected

Nice dicksucking there, stupid and proud right? Let me break it down for you.

Castlevana: Symphony of the Night has nice graphics and music.

It also has terrible overall level design–it attempts to rip off Super Metroid but actually has a far more linear structure: you get an ability, move to the usually singular next area of the castle and repeat. Then there's a shitload of abilities that you use once to unlock the next path and never touch again. Then you get to the halfway point in the game (upside-down castle) and they drop the Metroid act entirely.

The stat system was an interesting idea but ultimately heavily flawed in execution. The game is absolutely laughably easy for the most part, but there are a couple areas in the upside-down castle with weird difficulty jumps. Then there are the myriad pieces of equipment you can easily stumble upon which break the game utterly.

Ultimately, it's a game without direction: they simply stuffed as much shit into it as they could. And I do mean shit. More than half the bosses are fucking retarded and pointless, the upside-down castle was the shittiest gimmick ever, and the game is sorely lacking the intense, constrained action that previous Castlevanias had.

It also has some of the worst voice acting ever. But strangely some people find that a positive.

It is very interesting how nearly every subsequent Metroid-like Castlevania improved on the gameplay featured in Symphony of the Night, yet some people still hold it on an undeserved pedestal.

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Wouldn't surprise me if that was the sort of mindset that kept Namco from bringing much of the post-PS1 era 2D sprited Tales games overseas (Phantasia GBA and iPort being an exception, and both times a bad version of the game; the GBA one being a poor frankensteining of the SFC and PS1 versions, and the latter being really money hungry for microtransactions). Granted, the PS1 games they did bring west, Tales of Destiny and Tales of Eternia (as Tales of Destiny II in the west), sold abysmally anyhow to the point that where I live they average $75-100 and $90-120 each, but that might have been due to poor marketing more than simply not being in 3D. Regardless, aside from the botched ports of Phantasia (and a JP/PAL only port of Eternia), every Tales game to newly come west since then have been ones that used 3D graphics.

DF's adventure mode UI is easy (I know you're shitposting, but anyway). The main problem with DF adventure mode is that there's no point to shit, and reputation doesn't work yet.

Yeah I am aware of this. I wasn't implying ram & cpu = better game. I'm saying that the power of modern machines could be used for something other than MORE PARTICLE EFFECTS! MORE RAY TRACING! MORE POLYGONS!

Indie games decide that if you can't have grafics you can't have anything, which is a trash attitude.

have you ever played a 2D metroid? Or 2D (top down) Zelda game? Those are fun, a lot of fun. A lot of the mechanics aren't deep, which is fine. But what if they were? What if the enemies acted intelligently. What if there was persistence, complex event systems, and other things like that?
We have the power to do that now. That's what I'm getting at.

While I'll say that there isn't anything that happens in the grand scale of things (power structure, even if you do what I did and became a vampiric necromancer that attacked a demon strong enough to pose as a deity who had control of an entire kingdom with an army of undead and undead bodyparts) I like to point out that sometimes it's kind of comfy reading what the hell exactly happened with some of the bigger figures in your history, even one of your old characters.

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You killed a false god? Nice! How'd you do it? I thought they were basically invulnerable.

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Only half right. Graphics were just a perk what I'm talking about is this:

Even VF with all the praise it got here couldn't manage an arcade perfect port until the Dreamcast came out.

Graphics were important but they weren't the only thing that we were missing out on read this post he gets it

Instead of larger game worlds, better AI, and arcade perfect ports we had all matter of 3D attempts spewed at us. For every good 3D game in the 32-bit generation there were at least 10 that are totally forgettable and countless series that were lazily ported to 3D in an attempt to cash in. No one wanted to bring 2D to market because they thought the market dried up over night, they bought into the meme. In reality there was a large population that enjoyed those type of games and were willing to spend money on them.

It isn't about muh graphics, it's about muh movement and muh gameplay. If I were a hipster faggot I'd be in here telling you NES graphics were the peak of 2D. While the NES was fun it was improved upon my leaps and bounds in the 16-bit generation. We could have gone even further in 32-bit but collectively we allowed for any development of those games to die off. We voted with our wallets and we voted wrong.

You know what most people did when VF came out? They played it for about a week for the novelty and went right back to MK/SF/KoF because those games were more fleshed out and fun. Same thing with most early games aside from racing. Racing games had been pushing for 3D for some time and people enjoyed it because 3D space was needed to for that particular genre. I enjoyed a lot of shit on the PSX/Saturn that wouldn't have worked as a 2D game.

I'm guessing you're a youngfag that didn't live through the change over. Tell me more about how everything after 2007 is shit and I'll tell you more about how everything after 1995 suffered for exactly the same reasons AAA games are shit today. 32-bit era was the start of small studios getting bought up by big ones and the industry pushing a certain style on everyone. The user going on about reviews is right although he picked a shitty game to back up his point. Reviewers were giving games that looked "old" (2D) bad marks just because they weren't attempting to take the series into 3D. I have tons of magazines from the era that back this up. No, I'm not digging out a scanner just to prove it.

First of all, look at the shit that people assume was the "pinnacle" of 2D in this day and age. Second, look up some fucking low-poly art. It'll take the opinion you started this thread with and shit it in the dumpster.

Aaand I forgot my first example!

Damn. The industry has been cancer a lot longer than I thought.

Yea, nice argument user. You got me. I'm just mad because my fetish for horrible pixel art and low poly games wasn't begin satisfied in the mid 90s. Oh wait

Nice rebuttal user, you got me.

You think you're saying "hey look theres good 3d and bad 3d just like theres good 2d and bad 2d"

What you're actually saying is "look at this modern lowpoly with high resolution textures that cant possibly be compared to what op is posting because it wasn't possible at the time. Look at it next to something shitty made in modern times. Look man see? Everything is relative man."

No everything isn't relative man. You are an idiot and are speaking about that which you have no idea, and in a world absent of people like me who are mean to people like you, your opinion is the majority. For that, I hate you.

Nigga, the '90s were the height of 3D platformers and when pretty much all of the good ones were made. You have a couple greats on the PS2 and then barely anything. You're gonna sit here and say Mario 64, all the Crash and Spyro games, Sonic Adventure, and Banjo/Conker/DK64 are all shit?

Throwing out all 2D games might have been shortsighted, but the focus on 3D allowed for an explosion of new genres. Every other generation of games basically only had minor upgrades to what was previously possible, this was the only gen to see whole new shit get started.

Also, I'll admit that as a kid, I would completely look past most 2D games on the PS1. I bought a PS1 because this 3D shit was blowing my mind, and I wasn't about to waste my time buying games for it that could have been played on my Genesis or Super Nintendo. Some games still were fucking awesome, like Tomba, but overall, I just wanted more Crash Bandicoot. I still just want more Crash Bandicoot. I saw Mega Man X4 or whatever on PS1, and it seems like practically the same game as X and X2 on SNES (actually, now I'd say X and X2 are better). So why did I buy this PS1? Those cutscenes? Yeah they were cool at the time, but I could have gotten that shit on Sega CD, and it didn't take anyone long, even back then, to see that Sega CD was shit. But I still use cutscenes and voice acting to argue that PS1 is better than N64, all these years later.

You are one dumb underage nigger

metacritic.com/game/playstation/castlevania-symphony-of-the-night

You can stop rewriting history nigger.
www.ign. com/articles/1997/10/03/castlevania-symphony-of-the-night

www. please use archive.is/reviews/castlevania-symphony-of-the-night-review/1900-2546968/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania:_Symphony_of_the_Night#cite_note-43

I bet you think Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 are overrated too

Just fuck already and get it over with, you faggots

Actually, that picture looks great. It's too bad that it's a parody of a shitty series. If Mass Effect wasn't pozzed bullshit that takes itself too seriously, a cutesy spin off game would be awesome.

By 12 year olds still interested in playing MK because it was edgy. Anyone with taste in fighting games were playing SF Alpha, Super Turbo, SamSho, Fatal Fury, KoF, or VF2

Again, by 12 year olds. MK3 is widely regarded as the game where the series jumped the shark.

Considering MK3 blows nigger dick as a fighting game, it deserves to be thrown away. Virtua Fighter is far better mechanically.

It's entirely possible for good games to be overrated.

Ocarina of Time when it makes "greatest game of all time" lists absolutely, SM64 I'd say not really.

I wish 2D had lived at least one generation longer.

Saturn and Neo Geo were the last great consoles.

3D platformers were an unexpected treat and I did enjoy them. However, many series at that time didn't work in 3D but were quickly converted to it because "if it ain't 3D it won't sell". Mario 64 is probably the main exception to this and showed everyone else how to do it right. But it and all its clones suffered from the problems of having to slow the action down to accommodate the 3D space. This is why the boss fights were so similar and slow in Mario 64 they couldn't really do much else with it.

Look at the main rival to Mario: Sonic. Did Sonic really work as a 3D game? The adventure series stands out but look how long it took to get there (1999). Sega was left without the use of their main mascot for an entire generation because they couldn't figure out how to make him work in 3D effectively. They couldn't slow him down much because they'd spent so many years marketing him on speed. Would that series have been better served with a 2D game that stayed true to the Genesis formula with improved graphics/sound or do you think the time line we ended up in was better? Fans obviously wanted those games, they still want them and that's why the ROM hacking community exploded around it and why Sega is creating those games again.

I agree cut scenes were cancer but a comparison to the Sega CD isn't really the best example. It had too much FMV shovelware and the video quality was crap. Look at what it did well though: Games that could have been on a cartridge but used the CD for more in-game content and CD quality audio. Those were rare gems on that console. Now imagine those games never died off and instead became a standard on the PSX/Saturn with all the benefits of more RAM, a better CPU, better sound, better resolution, and better art. We could have had some real masterpieces.

3D was going to take off but 2D didn't have to die for it. That's all I'm saying. I'm sick of hipsters pushing 2D trash as well because they don't put in the effort and have no idea why the old games were received so well.

We gave up text for this.
OP gave up women for cock.

Got an opinion that matters or did you just want to rehash an old argument from the arcades in the 90s? UMK3 was considered the best in the series and that's why it's still played today. It was the killer app, that's why Sony paid for an exclusive and the Saturn had to rush out an MK2 port for launch.

The first VF was trash compared to any of the other games you listed. Once it was hashed out it was a good game. But it certainly wasn't in the first version and the ports didn't do it any justice. When the 32X version feels better than the Saturn one you know you have a big problem.

I knew using the picture in OP would draw in plenty of people like you. You people have been going on about how great VF is since the 90s. I even have an old issue of Gamepro where someone wrote in with a 4 page rant about how the reviewer was an ass for not giving his beloved game a perfect score.

In the old days we played everything. You didn't go to an arcade and camp one machine for long. Wanna know how I know you weren't around? Because if you were you would have seen the lines for all the games you mentioned. I had to stand in line for 30 minutes to play MK2 upon release and everyone in that line was 16+ except for me. There were even bigger lines for MK3. You know what didn't get a line? SF3 because no one could tell wtf it was (most of the cast gone and just "3" on the machine). I knew what it was of course but it was rare to be able to play it with anyone until much later. I even saw plenty of those machines get wheeled out of arcades because they weren't turning a profit.

You want a good 3D arcade game from that era that everyone loved and constantly pumped money in to? Look no further than Daytona USA. Surprise surprise, the home port was gimped.

I heard that originally Sega wanted to focus more on 2D because they didn't think 3D was ready yet.

Early on the Saturn was going to be more or less a 32-bit Genesis, but at the last minute they decided to give in to the 3D meme. That's why the Saturn as a system was such a mess.

How far were sprites gonna go?
really?
If you haven't noticed, pixel games are still evolving. Slowly, but it's happening.

Holy fuck, kill yourself. And you speak about keeping reddit shit on reddit. You are one dumb fucking nigger.

its okay.
at the rate tech is evolving we'll have something to replace polygons by the time it can flawlessly mimic 2d.

though i have no idea what it could be. stereoscopic something is my guess, but that's a meme gimmick at best currently

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its alright

Look up Sonic X-Treme. It seemed to have good concepts going for it, but Sega's corporate fuckery resulted in different people and divisions within the company sabotaging each other. Some amazing autist on Sonic Retro is getting really far in recreating Sonic X-Treme based on the short clips and magazine screenshots we have of it, and the bits we have make it seem like the core of a very good game that was simply never finished because of Sega corporate being Sega corporate. Yuji Naka made them restart the game because he didn't want them using his NiGHTS engine, and then shortly after restarting, Sega execs happened to stop by and were accidentally shown a prototype that was even less finished than the restarted version they were working on, so they fired everyone except like two people, and then one of them got sick and almost died.

And then the game became Sonic Adventure anyway, but in the process they killed the Saturn and arguably laid the groundwork for Sega's ultimate demise.

Also Sonic Adventure came out in Japan in 1998. The same year as Ocarina of Time, which people (idiots) love to claim is a very early 3D game (even though it isn't).

Besides, Crash Bandicoot was 3D Sonic for that gen, only made by a (then) competent developer who could actually finish games.

You can pick out a couple gems but you know full well that the overall library was shit compared to what you could get on SNES or Genesis.

I linked two reviews. Do you have the attention span of a goldfish?

Well, you just did what you were critizicing before:
"one or two reviews from X country prove nothing!"

Also, for the record, I wasn't implying that SotN (or Guardian Heroes) got literal below 5/10 scores. It just got scores that are very far from the masterpiece status it achieved once we entered the 2000's.

How do you expect to communicate 3D movement on a flat screen without using 3D graphics to some extent?

Sprite scaling obviously.

I'm only shitting on insisting jumping to 3D for character or object models that make programming more impressive shit in like structures or bosses take too long and overwork teams, in literally too many to list instances leading a developers to flat out state in interviews some segment or entire boss got cut because it was too much work to properly make the game.

I'd say something like the Digimon World games for DS perfectly handled the concept, not the execution, of 3D worlds with sprites and 2D animation. The areas themselves are too small, but imagine that much greatly expanded and fleshed out with better technology and physics for consoles and more powerful handhelds with plenty of room to cram loads of content and polishing fully deserving of that $60.

MK, with its roster that handles with the same weight and momentum and broken AI in single player, is objectively shit compared to SF or any fighting game from the same time.

Played by retards nostalgic for shitty games like MK.

Except that was for MK3 regular dumb nigger, and it was timed exclusive for PS1. UMK3 was out on everything from PC to SNES to Saturn to even the Genesis.

And Sony only went after vanilla MK3 because of hype the series generated because of its violence and edgy 10 year olds obsessed with it

I know.

The Saturn version was rushed to meet a launch date; it was playable with VF Remix a few months later.

None of this has anything to do with 3D being worse than 2D, you're just blog-posting to hear yourself talk because you think you're hotshit for playing an over hyped turd that sold on controversy alone.

Virtua Fighter 2, a 3D game that predates MK3 by 4 months and plays far better.

The fact that you're defending reviewers–especially fucking Gamepro, who were always a mag not worth wiping your ass with–shows what a fucking tool you are.

You're basically moviebob; a dipshit who thinks his misspent nostalgia on trash from 25 years ago makes you some sage and that you couldn't possibly be wrong or have wasted time playing garbage while other more scrutinizing people knew what good games were, regardless if they were 2D or 3D