Best looking games of all time for when they came out

[Vendetta]

I should've realized that name, but I didn't. Ah well. Are there any screenshots of what Starfox 2 would've looked like?

There are a few shots out and about, the game was all but finished, and the last beta build produced is available from seedy internet dives in rom format.

Quite a lot of the later features of the series would have appeared here first. All Range Mode, selectable characters, different vehicles, even a strategic map layer that was finally introduced in Star Fox Command.

[Jade Falcon]

My two entries here. Two point and click adventures.

The first was the 1999 game The Longest Journey, the graphics in this game are still exquisite, though there are some issues with character graphics, the actual settings are really something.

The second game is the game of Blade Runner. Like TLJ, there are some issues with pixelisation on the characters, but the game really captured the look of the movie.

[Dalton]

I'm gonna go old-school here and say Super Mario Bros. 3. It looked pretty damn good for an NES game. Same goes for Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island on the SNES, which looked positively psychedelic at some points.

[phongn]

I'm gonna go old-school here and say Super Mario Bros. 3. It looked pretty damn good for an NES game. Same goes for Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island on the SNES, which looked positively psychedelic at some points.

The SuperFX2 made the SNES do unnatural things.

[Master of Ossus]

I'm gonna go old-school here and say Super Mario Bros. 3. It looked pretty damn good for an NES game. Same goes for Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island on the SNES, which looked positively psychedelic at some points.

The SuperFX2 made the SNES do unnatural things.

Ah, yes. Popping fuzzies. I loved the coloring-book-style of the game, too.

Nitpick, though: Yoshi's Island wasn't a sequel to Super Mario World. The two were, officially, unrelated.

[Vympel]

I hear they recently got Strike Commander to run at 25fps on the latest PC.

[weemadando]

Max Payne - beautiful models, textures and level design.

[weemadando]

I hear they recently got Strike Commander to run at 25fps on the latest PC.

*double take*

THEY HAVE QUANTUM ARCHITECTURE WORKING??!?!?!

[Bounty]

And did DKC use the same thing, or was it something else. I just keep having "MMX" stuck in my head, but that was a PC thing.

DKC didn't use the SFX or -2, that was just brilliant pre-rendering and *I think* a form of motion-capture animation.

I should've realized that name, but I didn't. Ah well. Are there any screenshots of what Starfox 2 would've looked like?

The game was actually 95% complete when the plug was pulled in favout of the new Project Reality Starfox game. Apart from minor debugging and removing dev code I think it was pretty much ready to ship.

Keep in mind that this is a mid-nineties game running on an obsolete 16-bit console. From the first few minutes of the game (sorry for the tiny shots) -

The new Great Fox

Intro screen

One of Andross' Star Destroyer-esque ships

Dogfighting

Approaching the Battleship

And an upclose shot to show some scale. The burgundy strip is a beam coming from the Battleship's main guns.

Walker mode in the Battleship's corridors

Flying out after blowing up the main reactor

Kaboom


The game had a very intriguing structure: rather than having specific levels that you could complete at your leisure, the whole game played in real-time, even on the map screen, where you had to pick your next targets based on how close they were to Corneria and how much of a threat they posed. A sort of bare-bones RTS combined with regular dogfighting, both on-rails and free-range.

The only real problem is that analog controls don't mix well with 3D gameplay. Turning the mech-form Arwing with the triggers was apparently a bitch.

[Bounty]

I was wrong about the Super FX 2 being unreleased - it's in the Yoshi's Island cart. Doom and some Olympics game had it too, I think.

[salm]

Turrican

[Dalton]

Nitpick, though: Yoshi's Island wasn't a sequel to Super Mario World. The two were, officially, unrelated.

True, but it's still referred to as Super Mario World 2, even on the box art.

[Drooling Iguana]

Final Fantasy 7. It looks a little dated nowadays graphics wise, but when it first came out the general opinion of FMV was that it mostly sucked. Until Squaresoft pulled out the stops and sunk a lot of work into making quality FMV cutscenes for FF7.

What? I played that game when it was new and my first impression was that the graphics were utter crap. They had bloody cubes for hands, for chrissakes, and most of the FMV was well behind what I'd been seeing in PC games for years already.

[SirNitram]

Final Fantasy 7. It looks a little dated nowadays graphics wise, but when it first came out the general opinion of FMV was that it mostly sucked. Until Squaresoft pulled out the stops and sunk a lot of work into making quality FMV cutscenes for FF7.

What? I played that game when it was new and my first impression was that the graphics were utter crap. They had bloody cubes for hands, for chrissakes, and most of the FMV was well behind what I'd been seeing in PC games for years already.

Yea. FF6 pushed the limits of sprites and was actually good looking. The chibi freaks of 7 had me turned off from the game from Day One.

[wautd]

Syndicate: the graphics were on the same level with its gameplay. Brilliant
Dungeon Keeper
X-Com: fancy explosions and destructable terrain which even the most recent version is lacking
Doom (omg it has stairs!)
Unreal: when I left the crashed prison ship and looked upon the scenery outside I was shocked
Wing Commander 3: you could even fly trough the fighter bays of some cap ships
Mortal Kombat: in a period a zillions streetfighter clones, this one looked "realistic" instead of toonisch
Crusader: shiny, nearly everything was destructable, lots of different death animations
Conquest Earth: A RTS with an original concept, brilliant graphics and cutscenes and unplayable due to nonexistant AI
MDK: weird and beautiful

edit: Oh and Deadly Tide

[Vendetta]

What? I played that game when it was new and my first impression was that the graphics were utter crap. They had bloody cubes for hands, for chrissakes, and most of the FMV was well behind what I'd been seeing in PC games for years already.

The main advance of FFVII was using FMVs as backgrounds and having them appear to interact with the characters on screen. Which I can't recall having been done before.

It wasn't until FFVIII that they really kicked it up a notch with FMV rendering though.

[weemadando]

I'm going to go a little crazy and pull out names like:

Mickey Mania - had some really awesome looking pseudo 3d sections.
Halloween Harry - great looking sprite with parallax scrolling.
Janes Advanced Tactical Fighters - Wow! They put TEXTURES on them there polygons!

[Shogoki]

The main advance of FFVII was using FMVs as backgrounds and having them appear to interact with the characters on screen. Which I can't recall having been done before.

It wasn't until FFVIII that they really kicked it up a notch with FMV rendering though.

I thought The Curse of Monkey Island was much much prettier than FFVII.

[TrailerParkJawa]

Dragon's Lair was a big one for me during the days of laser disc games. At the time it was totally amazing. This was followed by Mach 3 which presented film backgrounds and computer generated aircraft in the foreground.

In the home computer market I'd say some of the early Cinemaware titles like Defender of the Crown were pretty amazing for the times.

When I was going to SJSU I remember seeing Out of this World on a Super Nintendo and really being impressed.

In more recent years I found the graphics in Dungeon Siege to be a joy to behold.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Max Payne - beautiful models, textures and level design.

I remember staring at screenshots and reading descriptions of it in motion over and over again.

[Julhelm]

How can we have a thread like this with noone mentioning Defender of the crown?

Holy shit was that game good-looking back in 86...

Then there's of course The Last Ninja as well.

[Lord Woodlouse]

Yes, but it wasn't called a demo then. It was Shareware . I paid six bucks for the Shareware version to be shipped to my house (well, my parents did). Ah, the things we did before the Internet. Glory to the blessed Internet.

The concept of shareware was a bit more than what was typically seen as a demo, it was usually a lot bigger, offering a good sizeable portion of the game to play. As for demos themselves, well, I remember playing them as far back as I can remember on my Commodore 64, well into the 1980s (Wolf 3D is a mid 90s game).

Anyway, my selection is...
Black and White. The scope of the graphics were quite breathtaking allowing you to zoom all the way in (so you could see a maggot in an apple) and zooming all the way out so you could float above the clouds and see the island in full. It all looked quite beautiful.

DN3D: Someone mentioned it already, but I remember being especially amazed by how realistic the setting seemed.

Quake: In some ways it actually felt like a step back after playing DN3D, but it has polygons! This is the game I have in my memory as marking the begining of truely 3D gaming.

Bladerunner: The cut scenes were lush.

C&C: Generals: Explosive eye candy.

Oblivion: Impressive scale, pretty.

Another World/Flashback: Playing this on the Amiga, the movement of the guy you controlled looked so fluid. Had a real cinematic feel to it (which, at the time, was quite rare in computer games).

[wautd]

Prince of Persia had pretty sweet animations for its time

[Eleas]

Elite. Like Wolf 3D, you had to be there. Or Shadow of the Beast; at the time, it blew everything else clear out of the water. Then, of course, there was Microcosm for the CD32, which had one of the first blending of FMV and shooter that I've seen.

[LadyTevar]

Dragon's Lair - This game came out in 1983 and today's games still don't look quite as good. Of course, that's because it used FMV, but that was a damn impressive feat back then. FMV didn't really come to the consoles or PC until a decade later. It wasn't just the fact that it was FMV, the artists who drew and animated it were very talented. It looked almost Disney quality.

Of course it's got near-Disney quality. It was animated by Don Bluth, who also did the following Animated films :
The Small One (1978) • Banjo the Woodpile Cat (1982) • The Secret of NIMH (1982) • An American Tail (1986) • The Land Before Time (1988) • All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989) • Rock-A-Doodle (1991) • Thumbelina (1994) A Troll in Central Park (1994) • The Pebble and the Penguin (1995) • Anastasia (1997) • Bartok the Magnificent (1999) • Titan A.E. (2000)