The Best of the Rest

[Neon Ignition]

Everything generation has its darling games that tie things off with a level of visuals that leaves players feeling like the consoles have been tapped out and new blood is required to raise the bar further.


The SNES and MegaDrive era waved goodbye having blown minds with Silicon Graphics and the introduction of 3D visuals, the 32 Bit era brought arcade accuracy much closer and evolved from basic 3D visuals to texture mapped titles with transparency effects and more, the 64 bit through 128 bit eras took us from fuzzy low res visuals all the way through to epic cinematic experiences whilst after that we've seen extensions of that with titles like God of War, Horizon, Alan Wake II etc.


But sometimes there are diamonds in the rough. Games that aren't necessarily the best games out there, or well remembered but were visually at least much better than they had any right to be.

What are the best looking retro games that have no right being as visually good as they are?

[wakka]

Vectorman was always a game that stood out to me on the Mega Drive. I used to get a lot of second hand carts that my next door neighbour's gran would pick up from car boots. I remember plugging that game in, knowing nothing about it other than what was on the sticker on the cart, and being blown away by the visuals. It looked really incredible compared to many games on the platform.

It was pretty average to play, of course. And they reused a ton of the same things over and over again in levels, probably to save storage space. But it was definitely a 'Wow' game for me.

[endo]

Donkey Kong Country is an obvious one that immediately springs to mind. I know it's all pre-rendered and not the graphical achievement that, say, Yoshi's Island is, but it certainly made a huge impression. It still looks vaguely decent even now, IMO. Fits the brief of not necessarily being the best out there too, as I never thought the gameplay was all that, even 30 years (****!) ago. It was always good fun, but nothing really new.

[endo]

Driver PS1 is another one. More for the "look" than the graphics per se. I remember staring at this running in the window of HMV Manchester on my lunch break one day, having no idea what it was but being blown away by how cinematic it was. I didn't know games could look like films back then, hubcaps flying off as the car flew round corners with dramatic camera angle changes. Got Ridge 4 around that period too and that blew me away as well, to be fair.

[egparadigm]

Random thought, but Captain Blood? Bought this at a market in the small City of Wells as a young boy:

[endo]

I really liked that game - great music too. Every planet ended up looking the same after a while, but the concept was good!

[egparadigm]

I really liked that game - great music too. Every planet ended up looking the same after a while, but the concept was good!

The 3D visualisation effect (all those angular lines together) is very of the time, you can see it in films of the era (or maybe a bit before that).

[wheelaa]

Red Zone (Zyrinx)

The Adventures of Batman and Robin.

[egparadigm]

Wind Waker? Cel shading, done well, does survive time better.

[wakka]

The Gameboy Colour port of Alone In The Dark was not all that fun to play but had pretty insane graphics. I'm not sure how it was done but it actually appeared to be in 3D, with the protagonist walking about on pre-rendered backgrounds. Literally like Resi on PS1 but shrunk down to the GBC.

Although an approach like Link's Awakening (maybe the graphically strongest Gameboy game, for me, overall) probably made more sense for the tiny screen of the GB, Alone In The Dark was genuinely incredibly impressive and I don't remember any other game that had similar visuals on the platform.

I got it because it was recommended to me by a member of staff in Electronics Boutique. Back in those days my local branch had really enthusiastic people working in it who loved games.

EDIT: Oh! I just thought of one more in a similar vein. Perfect Dark on GBC used a similar (and also highly impressive to me at the time) graphical technique, with Joanna Dark portrayed from a top down perspective. It had an interesting mix of level types, too, including sniper levels which were kind of Silent Scope-ish. I remember being very impressed by the fact that it had voice acting during cutscenes, also, which I don't remember any other GBC game doing.

I think the game wasn't all that amazing to play, honestly, so it def fits the 'Best of the rest' category despite being a big name.

It's really interesting what some developers managed to squeeze out of the GBC towards the end of its life.

[Atticus]

Wreckless on xbox always stood out to me as a fairly average game that looked really good.

[egparadigm]

The Gameboy Colour port of Alone In The Dark was not all that fun to play but had pretty insane graphics. I'm not sure how it was done but it actually appeared to be in 3D, with the protagonist walking about on pre-rendered backgrounds. Literally like Resi on PS1 but shrunk down to the GBC.

Good recommendation, I took a look on Youtube. More Point and click than true 3D but impressive nonetheless. It’s a shame Resident Evil never made it to market on GB Color in its original form. Incidentally I must try the prototype one day soon.

[wakka]

Yeah it looks like Resi used a similar technique, I agree that it's a shame that that never made it to release.

[Colin]

Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire would be a good call on PC Engine. For that little console which came out in 1987, it had no right to be pulling off some of the stuff in that game which came out in it's twilight years in 1995.

[Neon Ignition]

Wreckless was a textbook one, no way the devs could possibly be expected to land visuals like it had:








Which makes it all the more stark an achievement that their own sequel wasn't as good looking either.