dead souls
Member
It truly is. So many awesome looking games.
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What was the Best looking NES game anyway...
- Thread starter dragonzdogma
- Start date
It truly is. So many awesome looking games.
I've looked through this entire thread and if your definition of "best" means "the most highly-advanced graphics," I don't see how anything could possibly top Batman: Return of the Joker. Nothing else comes close. I remember playing it as a 11- or 12-year-old and it was just a constant state of wow. Every new scene was breathtaking, and the characters were huge and detailed, compared to other games.
If your definition of "best" is more like "most aesthetically-pleasing" then I can see why many are mentioning Kirby's Adventure. The entire presentation is charming and extremely well-done. Definitely on another level compared to many other games.
But really, just about every game in here looks great.
I've actually never heard of this one. This shot alone does not look all that impressive, so I'm assuming that there must be a whole lot more to this game. Are there any other screens/GIFs out there?
If your definition of "best" is more like "most aesthetically-pleasing" then I can see why many are mentioning Kirby's Adventure. The entire presentation is charming and extremely well-done. Definitely on another level compared to many other games.
But really, just about every game in here looks great.
Gimmick!
I've actually never heard of this one. This shot alone does not look all that impressive, so I'm assuming that there must be a whole lot more to this game. Are there any other screens/GIFs out there?
mattwhite924
Member
This thread made me want to buy Gimmick... and then I looked at prices on eBay. D:
Guess I won't be owning that game.
Guess I won't be owning that game.
People say Batman looks like a genesis game but there is a clear world of difference between it and even this:
And that's the system's launch title.
Obviously this is all opinion but I think it's hard to poke any holes in Kirby's style, visuals, color, effects, content, and variety. All around I think it's the best choice. Just my opinion obviously.
Honestly I think Batman looks better from a purely visual perspective because Altered Beast is simply a horribly ugly game.
But yeah you're never getting around some of the NES restrictions that give it a very obvious NES-look, such as the color palette, single background layer and sprite limitations (and batman does have quite a lot of sprite flickering, like most mid to late NES games). Still batman achieves a stylish look that works well with the restricted palette and uses enough parallax tricks to make a lot of the scenes appear more dynamic than a lot of games on more powerful hardware
It may not have been the most impressive graphically, but what they did with the music in Lagrange Point was incredible. What they were able to pull out using the VRC7 chip is impressive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drwX7MbB_IE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drwX7MbB_IE
If you don't mind spoilers, you can watch this annotated longplay of Mr Gimmick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYcf2yUgblc
My favorite annotated longplay ever, very informative with detailed historical and gameplay info (100% completion via savestate whoring, no deaths wasting your time) and only ~30 min total
Mr Gimmick Longplay Pt.
1/4 (8:50)
hikarutilmitt
Member
I don't think there's topping Return of the Joker in terms of NES visuals.
Bio Force Ape has some really amazing character animations for the time, though, and it runs impressively fast for the system as well. Turns out that what Sega does, Nintendoes as well. However, BFA was never officially released, but a prototype was eventually discovered, and the ROM dump of the prototype is available online.
Bio Force Ape has some really amazing character animations for the time, though, and it runs impressively fast for the system as well. Turns out that what Sega does, Nintendoes as well. However, BFA was never officially released, but a prototype was eventually discovered, and the ROM dump of the prototype is available online.
HueyFreeman
Banned
This does not look like a NES game.
EDIT: God bless the fucking internet that there is an immediately retrievable gif of this
mattwhite924
Member
It really is amazing how far the NES came over it's lifetime.
to this
is pretty nuts.
to this
is pretty nuts.
POTUS 2016
Banned
Gimmick! You mean. Do not reference that trash PAL version, but admittedly you've got to give credit to Sunsoft for reprogramming the EU version to match the NTSC speed.
OpinionatedCyborg
Member
It really is amazing how far the NES came over it's lifetime.
.
Check out Ten Yard Fight:
No special chips for this bad boy. I remember it having slow down too, but that was probably just how slow the damn thing ran. I actually had a lot of fun with it, though.
Thanks for this.
Like Kirby, I think it's very pleasing, and it looks like a lot of fun! Not sure if the visuals are more advanced than B:RotJ though.
Fascinating. I love 8-bit graphics, and I had no idea so many NES games looked so good! Of course I was aware of the chips in the cartridges expanding memory and other abilities, but games like Kirby blow my mind.
The NES didn't exist for the vast majority where I am so I grew up with the C64. The C64's cartridges didn't come with feature-expanding chips but there were ways of pushing it past what it was intended to do, with developers squeezing every little drop the machine could give, even down to manipulating bugs in the chips. The C64's VIC-II graphics chip could produce eight hardware sprites, for example, but still the C64 version of Lemmings is the only 8-bit version to feature all 100 lemmings on screen at once.
But the game with the most amazing visuals on that machine will always be Mayhem in Monsterland -
The speed, the smooth scrolling, the non-standard colours, the extra little animations such as Mayhem's eyes moving down as he edges towards a precipice that must be taking up precious cpu cycles... and to think, this game was developed by just two guys.
The NES didn't exist for the vast majority where I am so I grew up with the C64. The C64's cartridges didn't come with feature-expanding chips but there were ways of pushing it past what it was intended to do, with developers squeezing every little drop the machine could give, even down to manipulating bugs in the chips. The C64's VIC-II graphics chip could produce eight hardware sprites, for example, but still the C64 version of Lemmings is the only 8-bit version to feature all 100 lemmings on screen at once.
But the game with the most amazing visuals on that machine will always be Mayhem in Monsterland -
The speed, the smooth scrolling, the non-standard colours, the extra little animations such as Mayhem's eyes moving down as he edges towards a precipice that must be taking up precious cpu cycles... and to think, this game was developed by just two guys.
That part blew my mind when I first played it. That rockin soundtrack helped tooAlways thought Crisis Force looked great. It's not Batman though.
What's interesting with the PAL version is that it actually uses a custom Sunsoft mapper chip rather than one of Nintendo's MMC chips. It's the only game together with Batman: RotJ that uses a custom mapper chip (they both use the same one actually) on the NES. While it was common on the Famicom for companies to use their own custom chips, on the NES Nintendo mandated the use of Nintendo's own mappers. So it's interesting that Sunsoft was allowed to bypass this for some reason.
And the PAL version is hardly "trash".
But yeah it's missing the custom sound chip which makes it inferior.
nextgeneration
Member
Love these threads. It's always cool to reminisce and look back at old systems/games and see what the pinnacle in graphics were during that time.
mattwhite924
Member
It was never released, but I think Hard Drivin' deserves a mention.
I'm surprised they even attempted to port it to an 8-bit system.
YouTube Video
I'm surprised they even attempted to port it to an 8-bit system.
YouTube Video
D.Lo
Member
It's the console I think saw the most progression of any in history. It essentially covers two entire generations - it was created as a Intellivision/Colecovision/MSX1/SG1000 competitor in 1983 and competed directly with their single screen arcade games (eg it did Donkey Kong slightly better than the Colecovision) but was much more powerful and expandable, and essentially was then the definition of a new generation (vs Super Cassette Vision, MSX2, Mark III/Master System, 7800), redefining gaming with Super Mario Bros and Zelda, and then even competed comfortably with the first few years of the next generation, having many multi-platform games shared with PCE/Mega Drive with identical or near identical gameplay.It really is amazing how far the NES came over it's lifetime.
to this
is pretty nuts.
magicalsoundshower
Member
I'm a bit shocked River City Ransom hasn't been mentioned yet. Best use of color on the system I've ever come across.
My biggest issue with NES graphics has always been the somewhat strange master palette that doesn't seem well-rounded at all with its tendency towards cool colors.
I sometimes get the feeling that the palette issue actually sticks out more in later games that try to go for more detailed background graphics.
Kirby's Adventure seems to overuse orange (it's everywhere, for some reason, even the HUD is orange), SMB3 seems to have a thing for plastering cyan everywhere and most games that seem to go for a "dark" look seem to overuse purple and green.
River City Ransom makes it look like these issues are non-existant with coloring that rivals good-looking Master System games.
I admit that Mega Man 5 and 6 also have amazing uses of color in places.
My biggest issue with NES graphics has always been the somewhat strange master palette that doesn't seem well-rounded at all with its tendency towards cool colors.
I sometimes get the feeling that the palette issue actually sticks out more in later games that try to go for more detailed background graphics.
Kirby's Adventure seems to overuse orange (it's everywhere, for some reason, even the HUD is orange), SMB3 seems to have a thing for plastering cyan everywhere and most games that seem to go for a "dark" look seem to overuse purple and green.
River City Ransom makes it look like these issues are non-existant with coloring that rivals good-looking Master System games.
I admit that Mega Man 5 and 6 also have amazing uses of color in places.
That's the joke...And the bottom screenshot is definitely from the GBA version, AKA Super Mario Advance 4. That screenshot is from the eReader mode.
Moon Crystal also has great sprite animation, I think it has already been mentioned, but here's a gif.
This GIF needs the climbing animations desperately. Those are the best part.
I always thought the Untouchables was amongst the systems most impressive moments. Couldn't believe it at the time.
I was blown away from EGM's preview of Untouchables from Summer CES 1990.
lastrealgameralive
Member
Super Mario Bros 2
or
Ninja Gaiden
or
Ninja Gaiden
like.a.ser
Member
I always thought Mighty Final Fight looked great.
And the insane Little Samson:
And the insane Little Samson:
It was never released, but I think Hard Drivin' deserves a mention.
I'm surprised they even attempted to port it to an 8-bit system.
YouTube Video
The Retronauts episode that talked about this was great. It's the Tengen episode I believe.
mattwhite924
Member
I ended up making my own Metal Storm gif. I should have done a gravity flip in it too, but oh well.
HF2014
Member
This won't win the contest, but Bases Loaded still looks pretty good after 30 years:
View from behind the pitcher, numbers on the uniforms, that bullpen car!
All the neighborhood kids played this and Baseball Stars and dreamed of a game with the graphics of the former combined with the team management options of the latter.
And not until much later did I discover that the players were not made up: the original Japanese Bases Loaded had a Nippon Pro Baseball license and all the stats and jersey numbers are correct. (So that's why there were so many low-numbered pitchers; in Japan that's a thing.)
I like MLB The Show as much as the next guy, but I'd pay for a game like this one if it had full customization.
Bases Loaded was amazing! That pitcher view was something!
RowdyReverb
Member
Great explanation, thank you!I can explain this!
Well, not really. Kinda.
The hardware required to do this wasn't particularly special or unique as NES games went. Chips didn't tend to soup up the power of the console in any way, they primarily added more storage space and ways to interface with that storage space. Stuff like having more "virtual screens" to work with, more data banks you could swap in on the fly, etc. Honestly the most unique chips were the ones that added sound channels like VRC6 in Japan for Castlevania 3.
In any case, they weren't like "let's make a special chip that can do parallax, just for this one game!" You could do parallax on the basic hardware. There was built in functionality called "sprite 0 hit," so that when rendering, if the system encountered sprite 0, it would go "whoa whoa wait a minute, the programmer wanted to do something when we got to this point on the screen, go ahead, run a subroutine real quick." And you would change the way the display was being split at that point. This was commonly used for things like horizontal HUDs like Mario 3's.
Or you could also just time your code really carefully, down to the CPU cycle, so you'd know the moment the renderer is at the end of a horizontal line so you can tweak the scrolling at that exact moment. Some cartridge mappers included timers that could make this easier too. Vice: Project Doom may have been done this way. A lot of earlier, basic parallax was done this way.
Notice how none of the physical platform/background elements jut out into the scrolling part in the top half of the screen. This is because they'd get broken and scroll at the same speed as everything else. Only sprites are allowed up there.
This particular part of Batman: Return of the Joker was done this way too, again, there's nothing other than sprites overlapping that middle section, the screen is just being split and scrolled at a different rate, and then split again:
_21.gif)
But then what about examples like these?
This particular kind of parallax was done by essentially playing an animation of mountains/clouds moving on a set of background tiles.
One common configuration for NES cartridges was the difference between ROM graphics and RAM graphics. The default way to do graphics, and the way many early games did it, was pre-written banks of tiles that were not changeable, but you could swap in and out different banks as quickly as you wanted. The other way to do it was giving the cartridge RAM space you could write to at any time, allowing the programmer to compress the graphics in code or modify small parts or individual tiles, however this tended to be slower.
Both of these methods could animate tiles. The ROM way, by bankswitching rapidly and continuously (though this tended to be wasteful of those precious, limited banks) and the RAM way, by having super efficient code that could write new tiles to RAM every frame. RAM was much more popular toward the end of the NES's lifespan, and obviously it's the method that survived to all other platforms from then on, I think even the Game Boy was RAM only.
I can't say for sure which method the above games used, but I do know that Battletoads used RAM.
See, vertical parallax is nearly impossible, because TVs draw the screen in horizontal lines from top to bottom. It's easy to interrupt the image mid-draw during the brief period of HBLANK and tell it the screen is now scrolled differently left or right...there was absolutely no good way to interrupt it halfway across the screen and alter the vertical scroll, and do that for every single horizontal line all the way down, with pixel precision.
So they played an animation in those tiles, every time the player moved downward. If you could look at all the background graphics being used to render the level, it would look like this:
And Batman and Sword Master would look similar to that as well.
Notice that Sword Master's mountains are actually a pretty thin repeating strip, with lots of darkness above and below that don't require any graphics at all. Really very few tiles there that need to be animated.
I ended up making my own Metal Storm gif. I should have done a gravity flip in it too, but oh well.
Nice!
Always thought Crisis Force looked great. It's not Batman though.
Whoa, I forgot about Crisis Force. Here's some 60fps footage of the chasm segment.
https://youtu.be/NsrjcZSQ0tY?t=2m52s
Kinda reminds me of of 3rd level of M.U.S.H.A.on Genesis.
polyh3dron
Banned
Joking, right?
In case you weren't, that game isn't a NES game. Was made for modern consoles/PC.
LOL.
Deckard Chapel
Banned
It's literally SEGA Genesis quality - on an NES.
Konami was ahead of the curve back then. They always had badass soundtracks to their games in the 80's and 90's.
JediLink
Member
Kirby's Adventure and Gimmick both come to mind for me. Bright colours and simple shapes do wonders.
Why 2 though? The graphics kept improving as the series progressed so it'd be 6 if anything imo.runner up Mega man 2
those huge sprites were awesome no?
like the huge dragon and dog that spit fire - I was so jelly my brother's didn't let me play it
AkimbO_Arcana
Banned
Kirb....
*seeing gifs in this thread of unheard games*
holy shit, NES was a beast O_O
*seeing gifs in this thread of unheard games*
holy shit, NES was a beast O_O
Absolutely incredible music. VRC7 puts to shame even the Sega Mark III with FM sound.
Indeed.
blummer102
Member
Those posting Batman: Return of the Joker (Dynamite Batman in Japan) might be interested in hearing why the game looks so good - basically it began as a tech demo for a special Sunsoft chip, and Batman was kinda thrown in there to appeal to international audiences at the last minute. (Which is why the game has him travelling through jungles and fighting a tank and plenty of other weird un-Batman things.)
The VP of Product Dev for Sunsoft in the 90s went on Famicom World a while back and gave a description of the game here (first post and read on)
Biggest points quoted for ya:
The VP of Product Dev for Sunsoft in the 90s went on Famicom World a while back and gave a description of the game here (first post and read on)
Biggest points quoted for ya:
not quite lol
ResidentDante
Member
No it's not, the first Streets of Rage OST alone pisses on this or over any NES music for that matter.
Impressive for an 8-bit system, sure, but this is going way to far.
Other 8 bit systems used FM chips too. Better ones at that.
D.Lo
Member
It's not about the composition quality.
The VRC7 allows 6 channel FM synthesis audio. It is like literally having something similar to the Mega Drive sound chip on the cart. It's actually essentially the same as the Mark III FM unit, except that the Famicom's normal sound chip (already quite a bit superior to the Mark III/Master System sound chip which the Mega Drive also had in addition to FM) is also used at the same time.
Which ones?