You know how it goes. Whenever there's a breakthrough in graphical technology in the industry, certain developers will be all over that shiny new thing like a kid who suddenly discovers the lens flare in their cracked Photoshop. After a while when things have settled down people can start utilizing these features in a more modest fashion.
When the SNES came out with a couple of hardware-supported effects like rotation using Mode7, some games felt to mee a bit "overeager" in their application of this. I think early Konami titles are the most guilty of this, with the worst being Contra 3 and its top down levels. IIRC you used the shoulder buttons to rotate the entire level for navigation. The fact that they removed them from the GBA version is a testament to what a poor call that was.
Throughout the 90's there were a bunch of advancements on the 3D acceleration front with new tricks constantly trickling in like colored lighting, transparency and alpha allowing for things like lens flares etc. I have a hard time thinking of titles that really shoved this in your face to such an extent though. One thing that comes to mind is a chrome robot character in Virtua Fighter 2/3 whom I presume was pretty much made just to show off fancy reflection effects on the model.
I think it was in the previous console generation when things really started getting out of hand. Specifically, this was when games started relying extensively on post-processing effects. Suddenly there are these tools available which enable developers to mimick cinematic or photographic artifacts and phenomenoms which occur in other mediums.
One of the earliest post-processing implementations was bloom and HDR. Plenty of games from the mid 00's are guilty of overusing this but one of the most infamous examples is Oblivion, perfectly demonstrated in this sarcastic screenshot.
Other things that annoyed me were usage of film grain overlays and an obnoxious amount of often primitive looking depth of field effects. Dragon Age Origins used insanely distracting DoF during dialogue which bothered me to no end. Can't find any screenshot of this unfortunately.
Overemphasized normal maps was another problem. A normal map is a texture layer which specifically interacts with the lighting to fake depth on what would otherwise be a flat surface. I think Doom 3/idtech 4 was pushing it a bit sometimes, likely a result of the engine relying much more on real time lighting than others. I distinctively recall when Quake 4 came out, and people modded the game to increase the specularity of the normals by like 200-300% in order to "improve" the graphics. I couldn't believe people genuinely thought that looked better. It was like everything was covered in vaseline which is the typical result of overindulgence in normals.
Nowadays this issue mostly seems relegated to hobbyist-made HD texture mods for PC games. All too often people seem to think that overly detailed and noisy normals makes things look visually superior. In this case here a HD texture mod for Skyrim:
When the SNES came out with a couple of hardware-supported effects like rotation using Mode7, some games felt to mee a bit "overeager" in their application of this. I think early Konami titles are the most guilty of this, with the worst being Contra 3 and its top down levels. IIRC you used the shoulder buttons to rotate the entire level for navigation. The fact that they removed them from the GBA version is a testament to what a poor call that was.
Throughout the 90's there were a bunch of advancements on the 3D acceleration front with new tricks constantly trickling in like colored lighting, transparency and alpha allowing for things like lens flares etc. I have a hard time thinking of titles that really shoved this in your face to such an extent though. One thing that comes to mind is a chrome robot character in Virtua Fighter 2/3 whom I presume was pretty much made just to show off fancy reflection effects on the model.
I think it was in the previous console generation when things really started getting out of hand. Specifically, this was when games started relying extensively on post-processing effects. Suddenly there are these tools available which enable developers to mimick cinematic or photographic artifacts and phenomenoms which occur in other mediums.
One of the earliest post-processing implementations was bloom and HDR. Plenty of games from the mid 00's are guilty of overusing this but one of the most infamous examples is Oblivion, perfectly demonstrated in this sarcastic screenshot.
Other things that annoyed me were usage of film grain overlays and an obnoxious amount of often primitive looking depth of field effects. Dragon Age Origins used insanely distracting DoF during dialogue which bothered me to no end. Can't find any screenshot of this unfortunately.
Overemphasized normal maps was another problem. A normal map is a texture layer which specifically interacts with the lighting to fake depth on what would otherwise be a flat surface. I think Doom 3/idtech 4 was pushing it a bit sometimes, likely a result of the engine relying much more on real time lighting than others. I distinctively recall when Quake 4 came out, and people modded the game to increase the specularity of the normals by like 200-300% in order to "improve" the graphics. I couldn't believe people genuinely thought that looked better. It was like everything was covered in vaseline which is the typical result of overindulgence in normals.
Nowadays this issue mostly seems relegated to hobbyist-made HD texture mods for PC games. All too often people seem to think that overly detailed and noisy normals makes things look visually superior. In this case here a HD texture mod for Skyrim:
