Splashdown was the gen z equivalent. Loved those racing games.
Splashdown had like a sea monster that would throw you back if you went outside the map. Was fun
So… This is kinda where I wish graphics stayed. It’s probably not the majority opinion, but I wanna feel like I’m playing a video game and not really life. Plus, I feel there was a bit more creativity in making graphics. I’m old, but I loved stuff in Doom and Duke Nukem and EverQuest. Everything now kinda just looks… Brown and dark? Or similar?
I dunno. Might just be the rantings of an old person!
Brown and dark was the Xbox 360 era. We’re in a post Fortnite, Rocket League, Minecart world now. The trend now is tons of color but in a way that I’m starting to get a little tired of everything looking like the same purple.
Don’t even bother making a new game unless it supports ray-traced light speculating through the anal-fog discharged from the main character’s arse. Every single pebble too within a 50 mile radius must be able to reflect the dripping, wolf-ey arse sweat drops too at all times using some buzzword engine tech or no one will buy the game
Doom had some pretty dark levels especially in a lot of the additional episodes and I personally think they were amazing. Half-Life 1 and 2 are similar and they’re both legendary games. Personally I would put the point where gaming started to go downhill at 2011 (with the release of skyrim).
(with the release of skyrim)
Oblivion. It was Oblivion with the stupid horse armor.
Oblivion was the start of the modern microtransaction issues, Skyrim was the point when game stories starting getting worse and more simplified (Quite sad that stories went downhill after Fallout New Vegas which was arguably the peak of incredible storytelling).
I don’t think there’s anything stopping modern games from having the same vibes, and being creative with graphics. I’d say one example of a modern game with high res graphics, realistic water, and even ray tracing, which still looks very unique and distinct is Paradise Killer. Another one that also looks quite modern in some ways while still being very distinct in its own way, is Heaven’s Vault. It’s a choice made by AAA studios because photorealistic visuals tend to attract more eyes and sell better, even if people get bored of the game quite quickly.
And the thing is, AC Unity - which came out in 2014 - still looks better than the majority of AAA games I see nowadays, and despite the large crowds which are a bit CPU demanding it still has much lower requirements than those games that look worse.
EDIT: And if you just want games that actually look retro and old school, there are some from indie devs doing that; examples include: Dread Delusion, The Case of the Golden Idol, Death Trash, Felvidek, Return of the Obra Dinn.
Lots of good, new stuff in the boomer shooters. If you want to try something like Duke 3D, check out Ion Fury, which was made in a fork of the original Build engine. Seleco and Hedon for modern GZDoom stuff.
Corn Kidz 64 has the best graphics of any game of the last 20 years. I will fight and die on this hill.
It’s all connected
You’ll be hard pressed to find any games that have better water physics than this game.
Only issue with the technology is that the waves were not dynamic; they were deterministic/the same every race.
From a speedrunners’ perspective, that’s a blessing, not an issue!
If you played multiplayer, that made it even more fun. Being in first place meant you’d trigger certain waves, but then that could fuck up or really help someone behind you.
That’s true. They triggered different waves depending on your location.
But I’m willing to bet any recent games that focus on water do the same thing, just with bigger areas, and a few more trigger types.
Random seeds are pretty easy to do these days.
Harder to quality control for though
Yes they are. Not what I was talking about though
I loved how the water was a part of the course, just like the track. It never changed no matter how many times you play it. My fastest times were based on knowing where the waves are going to be as I’m coming around a corner.
For real. They really went all out on the water.
Weird… the game has barely anything to do with water in the first place!
It’s hard to really describe to younger generations just what it was like.
I’m an elder millennial (1984) and the changes to games within my lifetime has been breath taking and staggering.
The first game I remember playing is River Raid on my brother’s Atari. I was a vaguely plane shaped black block.
A couple years later, I find myself playing Super Mario Bros. A few more and it’s SMB3 and I’m holding a gameboy in my hands on the road trips to Florida to see my grandparents.
Then the jump to SNES and Genesis. Seeing that depth and life seep into the characters… The music gaining in complexity…
I even had a Sega CD and I remember how mind blowing it was when Sonic turned and ran towards the back to go through a loop instead of just side to side.
Then for it was PS1 with Final Fantasy 7… Graphical cut scenes like moving works of art.
After this point, yes there was still obvious and sometimes bigger jumps… But this is where it all was SO different each generation. Not just seeing extra small details and polishes. Large, discrete jumps forward
I wish I could give my wonder to anyone who never got to experience it. It was an amazing time to live.
Its a truly unique experience that only WE experienced. Anyone much older, wasn’t interested in video games, and anyone much younger, was gaming in realistic 3D before they could understand what was even happening.
I feel it’s similar to the person in the early 1900s who had a horse & cart as a kid and experienced the invention of cars, highways, planes and eventually space travel.
My biggest “wow” effect was Gran Turismo (1). The moving reflections on the cars!
～(つˆ0ˆ)つ｡☆
N64 was doing that years earlier with Top Gear Rally
N64 at the time appeared to be largely irrelevant within mainstream culture, in Europe at least. Not many people would have even knew of that game’s existence outside of magazine readers.
£70-£80 for new games (Irish punts by the way) which converts to €100 and that’s without adjusting for inflation. Jesus, the N64 really had no chance in Europe. Shame though.
Must give that game a go now though. Thankfully in hindsight we can all revisit some overlooked stuff.
I would have thought the Top Gear games would have been popular in Europe. The first two on the SNES were basically ports of Lotus and developed by Brits.
The closest I’ve felt to those monumental leaps in recent history was the first time I played VR. It feels similarly mind-blowing.
VR is great, but it’s just so hard to convince people with a trailer, it really is something that you have to experience, I’m glad there was a VR arcade here for me to try it out.
I laugh every time I see the words “literally unplayable” because of minor headache
Started with Atari 2600, now VR simrig racing.
I have friends my age who won’t play games in anything below 1440p, 120Hz and I’m like… You are denying yourself a whole world of awesome games and experiences…
I’m an elder millennial (1984)
As a millennial born a few years before you, I don’t really appreciate the “elder” wording you used there. I’d threaten violence, but I hurt my knee walking the other day and I don’t think that’d be good for either of us.
I think the next couple jumps were very good too.
Ps1 was just polygons, you could see all the edges and the games were not complex.
Then ps2 happened, now you get games like gta 3 and gran turismo. San Andreas was one of the longest and most in depth games in terms of all the mini games inside.
After that, came imo the peak of game graphics. Sure, some today might be technically better, but at the time, Crysis on very good hardware looked almost indistinguishable from reality. I remember seeing some highly detailed renders of people’s faces and thinking how it was just like real life.
After Crysis, there wasn’t really any other “big jump” unless you count the hard drive space requirements.
Having said that, bf3 and red dead 2 felt like milestones.
PS2 was definitely a huge jump to me, too
The biggest detail for me being that characters blinked outside of cut scenes in higher resolution (for the time) games like The Bouncer.
It stopped feeling like leaps after that. And even that, for me, felt more like polish.
But I love the discussion and I like seeing where and how people draw the lines!
I remember walking into Blockbuster one day, and they had a playable Super Mario 64. I was blown away by a game where you could move in 3D with graphics like that.
I started out on a Commodore 64. I remember when I encountered my first 3d accelerated game, I think it was Microsoft Motocross Madness, at a friend’s house, IIRC he had a 400mhz pentium with a Matrox card, I want to say G400, but who knows, it was so long ago… Anyway 3D games were common, but not with accelerated graphics… It was mind-blowing.
Monster truck madness… played the hell out of that back in the day
I’m a bit older than you but I feel that games have stagnated. It’s the same games over and over again with some exceptions.
This is a larger problem in our society at large: the financial class basically strangling creativity in search of ever increasing secure profit.
It sucks because the talent is all there to make these games and be creative but big money doesn’t want to take a chance.
So they shit out games that just reprise other things, remake old games, etc. for that more certain dollar. It’s no longer about making the best game of Z genre. It’s about ticking the most boxes to please the most people so the game will sell everywhere enough to fill greedy men’s pockets with money.
Also being from '84, I can absolutely relate. Although I mostly skipped ps1 for the N64. Super Mario 64 was a masterpiece.
I vividly remember when I saw the first game with filtered textures on a vodoo 1 gpu. The individual pixels… were gone! It was mind blowing :)
Wave race was legit. I still think about that game and I’m an old gamer
The original was great.
I developed an unreasonable hatrid for the GameCube version, however, when my younger brother would wake me up every morning with the sound of “beep, beep, beep, BEEP, BEEP!
WOO HOO! beep, beep, beep, BEEP, Beep! WOO HOO!
beep, beep, beep, BEEP, Beep! WOO HOO!”It was a solid sequel but god were the sound effects annoyingly repetitive, especially at 7am on a Saturday.
Its crazy how much graphics evolved during that time period, just two years later we got this:
?
Half Life
Thanks!
On PC, not N64.
I don’t think the post was explicitly about the N64, only impressive graphics
Some of y’all are gunna learn today that on this same system there was StarWars Pod Racing, and you could use 2 controllers, one for each engine. You’re welcome.
I wish I had known that back in the day. It was one of my favorite games on n64.
Yeah, I don’t think I knew about the two controller thing. I guess with emulation, PC releases, and dual sticks it wouldn’t be necessary now
A Switch with the controller disconnected gets you pretty darn close to the same feeling these days.
Good point
I am one of the lucky 10 000.
I always played podracer on my HOTAS like a pleb.
You could dual stick Goldeneye as well.
That was the “kismet” config right? I remember you could still aim and shoot with the second controller during cutscenes…so it was possible to kill Bond or other characters during the short scene after beating a mission. 😂
I had the PC version growing up. So, I mostly played with a Gravis Stinger, or a that weird Nintendo branded joystick. The yaw was how you rotated your engines.
I’m still impressed by the way wave race feels, not going to lie.
The first time I interacted with water and it did something in response instead of being static blew my mind.
Seeing my own reflection in a game hurt my brain.
wait what game has water effects with water reflections?
I think half life 2 had the first water that amazed me.
Bioshock was my first amazeballs water reaction.
We are old, but it was a great generation.
The 90s were also just a generally good time for gaming. It went from Doom in 1993 to Quake in 1996 and then Half-Life in 1998.
I never had an N64, but my buddy across the street did. Waverace 64 was incredible for its time.
I remember going over to a kid’s house that lived up the street from my cousin. He had Pilotwings on Super Nintendo like right after it released. And he had a big screen TV!
My god man, you would not believe how picture perfect those pixels the size of a finger tip were.
Oh man you just took me back. I was dirt poor as a kid and my mom always busted her ass to get us the latest Nintendo, but we usually only got a couple games. We rented and borrowed the rest.
Anyway.
I went with my step brother to his grandpa’s house one day. He said nothing to prepare me for the glory I was about to see. When we came through the door his grandpa greeted us and said, “Jason, take your brother to the game room.”
We walked down into the basement and there in the coolest, most badass, teen movie room, was this giant rear projection TV. There on the floor sat a console I had never seen before. The original PlayStation with the original controllers and Nascar Racing. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I swear to god I said, “OH MY GOD IT LOOKS REAL!” We played Tomb Raider. I just kept jumping into the pool. Mortal Kombat Trilogy, man what a game.
That Christmas two of my closest friends got the N64. One showed me Doom, the other Mario 64.
I ended up with the N64, my best friend got the PlayStation.
I’d love to go back for a day just to hang out with him. I wish he’d lived to see the graphics of today. Shit, if he’d made it long enough to see The Last of Us I’d be stoked.
I still remember seeing this for the first time, absolute mind blower for sure back then.
When Sony saw Crash Bandicoot running on a PS1 for the first time, they had no idea how the PS1 actually was able to run it.
When even the developers of the system you are using have no idea of how a program is running on their new system, they you know you have some advanced stuff:
I’m 3:30 in and they’re just rambling. Who makes this kind of content?
I know the story because I’ve seen this video where the developers actually talk about how they did it. Watch it instead.
I was thinking of this exact video too.
I love that video!
Karl Smallwood makes this content, some like it, others don’t.
It’s really funny to think about now, but we really were blown away by how nice this game looked.
Seeing SM64 at Walmart was crazy to me. I can’t remember which game it was on PS2, but I was thinking there’s no way they can improve graphics from here on out.
I remembered having trouble the first time a tried n64 at toys r us.
I couldn’t walk in a straight line easily.
I agree with you about ps2. I remember thinking that things could not get much better from that point on.
Is it possible the display controller was broken? N64 joysticks weren’t the most resilient and hoo boy did kids abuse those demo setups 😂
That’s actually a really cool thing we won’t see anymore: I remember those demo stands everywhere. Target, Best Buy, Toys R Us, whatever.
It was kinda cool walking up and just trying something… in my experience for like, 30 seconds before Mom was like “C’mon we have to go.” and I’d be hoping we passed by it again before trudging down the paper towel aisle or something… 😂
The water still looks better than some new games today 😅
I remember seeing Gran Turismo 3 for the first time. I was amazed, it looked like real life! When I tried it again in more modern times, Iike ish 2014, I was more like wtf, is that thing in the distance a car or a tree, can’t tell because the resolution is too low😃
