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[petran79]

during the 90s, PC gamers had this:

Console gamers had this:




and in even worse cases, they had this:




Console games wouldnt get digital for good till 2006

Hence why PS1 looks atrocious today. you played the game on an f.....ing (flickering) analogue TV!

even the worst PC monitor looked better than the best CRT television sets

 

[Max Knight]

Yeah, most PS1 games look like shit. Even though I never had any real exposure to PS1 back in the day, the games still look like shit when compared to their contemporaries. The sprite-based games look decent, but the 3D stuff by and large is just awful.

I'm of the opinion that, like its obnoxious load times, PS1's terrible 3D graphics are a result of trying to push new ideas before the hardware was ready to handle them properly.

 

[The Lamonster]

I enjoyed Parappa and SOTN, that's about it.

You are correct that the 3D graphics were ugly as hell and most PS1 games have not aged well.

 

[Triggerhappytel]

Most 3D PS1 games have aged badly, although some still look pretty nice - such as Crash Team Racing (and the Crash games in general), the Spyro the Dragon games, Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy IX.

 

[SneakyStephan]

I didn't mind the psx look
Always absolutely hated n64 graphics, been allergic to blur since before it was cool

the worst thing about that gen was the poor framerates
from 60 hz SNES/genesis games to the barely 30 fps shittyness of most psx/n64 games
then the ps2 /dreamcast came along and saved everyone with 60 fps glory

then the ps360 gen launched and everything went to shit

 

[Stiflers Mom]

I can go back and play everything from the 2600 on up, until I hit the psx/n64/saturn era, then I just have to jump over that whole blurry/framey/janky mess of an era then pick back up from Dreamcast on up

Exactly this...

 

[dead souls]

You are correct that the 3D graphics were ugly as hell and most PS1 games have not aged well.

Yep. If I'm in the mood for some retro gaming from my collection I always skip the PS1/Saturn/N64 era and play SNES/Genesis/Turbo Duo or even NES/Master System stuff. That first generation of 3D console gaming is really awful now.

 

[Makai]

Somehow I thought the PS1 was more powerful than the N64 as a kid. I think it was the backgrounds in Final Fantasy that convinced me.

 

[Clockwork5]

Yea, the polygons shaking, separating pretty much caused already terrible looking games to appear buggy and unfinished.

There were exceptions but 90% of polygonal games looked absolutely terrible on the ps1. Wipeout, colony wars and tekken 2 were the only 3d games I thought looked good on that system. I hated that system and all of the shitty games I played on it. Ok, I'm done.

 

[Dark_castle]

Legend of Mana still looks great today.

 

[yogloo]

Tekken 3 is God tier in terms of graphics and gameplay.

 

[Josh7289]

I dislike them too. The absolute worst part was the jumpy polygons/textures due to the lack of floating point support. The lack of texture filtering was also very annoying (except in the Mega Man Legends games, because they have a style that works well with it).

One of my friends and I had a running joke in elementary/middle school about PS1 graphics. We'd say things like if you saw a rising sun on a PS1 game, it'd just be a square, heh.

 

[rjc571]

Yep. If I'm in the mood for some retro gaming from my collection I always skip the PS1/Saturn/N64 era and play SNES/Genesis/Turbo Duo or even NES/Master System stuff. That first generation of 3D console gaming is really awful now.

Too bad, your collection is missing out on dozens of excellent 2D games from the PS1 era.

I didn't mind the psx look
Always absolutely hated n64 graphics, been allergic to blur since before it was cool

the worst thing about that gen was the poor framerates
from 60 hz SNES/genesis games to the barely 30 fps shittyness of most psx/n64 games
then the ps2 /dreamcast came along and saved everyone with 60 fps glory

then the ps360 gen launched and everything went to shit

Not everything went to shit, the Wii continued the PS2 tradition of having high quality 60 fps games.

 

[joecanada]

Like most things, it depends on the art direction.

Obviously being able to run such games at high, super-sampled resolutions improves things a lot.


Kind of unfair to compare Top Gear Rally with one of Sony's best developers, LOL. Games like Excitebike 64 and Beetle Adventure Racing are better representatives of the best N64 racing games had to offer visually.

yet that's exactly how the thread was created by trying to compare mario and zelda with psx most chunky looking games, which I noticed by the way, that ff7 cutscenes were not shown.... for obvious reasons.
still no comparison for games like mgs2

 

[Mudron]

Yeah, textures on the N64 may've been a blurry mess, but at least they were a relatively *organic*-looking mess - not like the PS1 where most textures were eye-gratingly pixelated and buckled/shimmered so much they almost seemed like they might fly off the polygons they were supposed to be anchored to.

I know the N64/PS1 were roughly similar in computing power, so it's interesting to look back and see which graphical resources each platform holder prioritized when designing their respective console - the PS1 could push more polygons than the N64 but had less texture processing power, whereas the N64 did a lot of texture processing to hide/make up for the system's low polygon-pushing power and it's narrow memory bandwidth.

 

[JLeack]

I liked them back in the day, but they haven't aged well AT ALL.

Hence why I want a face lift on Final Fantasy VII.

 

[Auto-Reply]

I didn't hate it but i always prefered the N64 look. My biggest gripe i had with it was the texture distortion.

Still MGS looked incredible at the time as did the first GT. When i think about impressive 3d visuals on that system it's those 2 that come up. Also the first Tomb Raider, all that doesn't look like much today but it was mindblowing to me back then.

 

[NinjamicWZ]

I was fine with it at the time, on good stuff, and 3D wasn't the only stuff on the system. I was more critical of the N64 at the time.

 

[lightchris]

during the 90s, PC gamers had this:

Console gamers had this:




and in even worse cases, they had this:




Console games wouldnt get digital for good till 2006

Hence why PS1 looks atrocious today. you played the game on an f.....ing (flickering) analogue TV!

even the worst PC monitor looked better than the best CRT television sets

PC monitors weren't any less "analogue" CRTs. Main difference was resolution.


@topic: Yes, PS1 (3D) visuals always felt distracting to me.

 

[Pyrrhus]

Someone needs to post emulator bullshots. i always love how they make them look how I imagined them.

That's practically all they have been doing. If you're going to compare them, it at least needs to be a fair contest. You need stuff from the actual consoles. Let's see those 320x240 N64 games with the bi-linear texture filtering and shitty edge anti-aliasing solution. Let's see the dithered colors and the 20 frames per second frame rates. Don't take a shitty 1997 screen capture of a game from videogames.com and put it next to a screen shot from an emulator running at 4 or 8 times the original resolution with 16x anisotropic texture filtering, 32-bit color, and 8xMSAA anti-aliasing.

Accurate, high quality video showing how bad the frame rates on a lot of the N64 darlings were would also help even the playing field. Ocarina of Time ran at 20 frames per second (and dropped lower than that when shit got crazy). Nearly all of Rare's games had trouble holding even 20. Perfect Dark lived somewhere in the teens and became damn near literally a slide show when things exploded. PS1 games usually targeted 30 fps and in some cases like Tobal and Omega Boost, managed to hit 60 fps even at higher resolutions than were normal. These were trade offs that people had to make back then that were influenced by the nature of the hardware.

I played some great stuff on the N64 that really impressed me, but it didn't automatically win all contests across the board when it came to presentation. Not by any means. We haven't even brought the dearth of FMV and recorded audio into the discussion. No pretty FMV intros for Nintendo's box in an era where that was a huge deal because of Nintendo's greedy, backward decision to stay with carts. And N64 sound was generally sparse, low quality, and repetitive because of, again, the lack of space on cartriges, and because the N64 had no audio co-processor like the SNES and PS1 had. Each channel of sound stole about 1% of CPU time from the calculation of AI, physics, and graphics. And if you wanted to use effects like reverb, it needed even more of the pie. So most devs skimped on sound production on N64 games.

 

[Branduil]

even the worst PC monitor looked better than the best CRT television sets

PC monitors were also analogue CRTs. The only difference was that many of them were capable of higher progressive resolutions and refresh rates.

 

[Linkenski]

You actually preferred the blurriness of the N64?

You missed out on some damn good games.

Do you call pixel-filtering "blurring" or what are you talking about? My main gripe with PS1 is that I hate the way the polygons don't move asynchronous with each other making animations look extra choppy when the camera is moving. The lack of pixel-filtering was also very ugly.

I'm still shocked the PS1 did so much better becuase N64 was just a much more powerful system with the exception of its game format which wasn't disc-based.

 

[KojiKnight]

PS1 visuals were always crap, even on the crap we called TVs back then. No sub-pixel precision for models, no z-buffer, zero texture filtering, and very poor polygons.

The best looking PS1 games tended to be those that just had giant 2D backgrounds with 3D sprites layered on top of them (see Final Fantasy series, Biohazard/resident evil, etc) and a few vise versa (3D backgrounds with 2D sprites ala Breath of Fire 3 and 4).

Do you call pixel-filtering "blurring" or what are you talking about? My main gripe with PS1 is that I hate the way the polygons don't move asynchronous with each other making animations look extra choppy when the camera is moving. The lack of pixel-filtering was also very ugly.

I'm still shocked the PS1 did so much better becuase N64 was just a much more powerful system with the exception of its game format which wasn't disc-based.

It's not all that surprising when you realize that N64 games often cost twice as much as PS1 games (carts were expensive yo!) Selling your games at $50-60 at launch when many PS1 games were $30-40 hurt a lot.

 

[H_Prestige]

Mario 64 and OOT are far more impressive than anything on the PS1. And they also controlled better since the ps1 controller was made for 2D games. Only thing ps1 was good at was FMV and CD audio. Hence why the best looking ps1 games are the FF games. They're not full 3D.

 

[Platy]

That era was also the home of one of the most underated art style ever :

Low poly 3D backgrounds with Sprites.

Theses days we only have what ?
Paper Mario with these graphics ?

Scorpion is weird on vita

 

[10k]

I didn't like the ps1 graphics either compared with the N64 but the games were too good to pass up.

 

[entremet]

yet that's exactly how the thread was created by trying to compare mario and zelda with psx most chunky looking games, which I noticed by the way, that ff7 cutscenes were not shown.... for obvious reasons.
still no comparison for games like mgs2

Cut scenes are not real time. They really should not count.

 

[Freshmaker]

It's a weird era, the clunkyness in some games made them look terrible, but the games that hit the balance between graphics and art style (like I think Ff8 did) really looked great and still look good today.
It was a bit like reading a book though, the game gave you all the most important pieces, but you still had to use your imagination to make it truely come to life.

That's not a straight console shot though. FF8 was a bit too ambitious IMO. The characters tended to dissolve into clumps of pixels super fast on the actual hardware.

 

[DrPreston]

The lack of z-buffering killed the PS1 for me. All those wobbly polygons gave me a headache. I stand by my opinion that the PS1 was better for 2D games and the N64 was better for 3D games.

 

[Shadow Hog]

I love them then and now

I think well get the point devs will take to it like NES pixel art and make games intentionally to look like psone games.

I can't wait for that day.

We're not quite there yet, but Minecraft always kind of gave me PS1 vibes:

I mean, PS1 with high-definition resolutions and obscene draw distances, and everything's kind of limited to cubes, but it's still a low-poly, low-res-texture aesthetic.

3D DS games (not to be confused with 3DS games) also had a PS1 aesthetic:

...but by this point, the stigma against 2D games had (mostly) subsided, so most DS developers smartly opted for 2D, as it looked significantly better.

 

[pottuvoi]

The PS1 never had proper z-buffer implementation, which is reponsible for the depth rendering. Obivously this is quite problematic when you have three dimensions. This resulted in pretty much every 3D object jittering around because the calculations were off.

Jittering didn't have anything to do with lack of z-buffer.

Only artifact caused by it was that sometimes polygons were visible when they were clearly behind something else. (Polygons had to be sorted from back to front and it's not good enough.)
Z-buffer is solution to this specific problem, it sorts polygons in pixel level during rendering.

Jittering was caused by lack of sub-pixel accuracy during rendering and in part by lack of precision in rotations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQMCDpomTK8

Warping of textures and goraud gradients was due to lack of perspective correction.

 

[KojiKnight]

I love them then and now

I think well get the point devs will take to it like NES pixel art and make games intentionally to look like psone games.

Err... I doubt it. 2D scrolling games benefit from the style because it recalls nostalgia when tackling an "outdated" game mechanic... but what game mechanics could be revisited that were exclusive to the PS1 era that aren't still done today?

I may not be phrasing it well... let's think about it like this.

How many big budget side scrolling shooter games or 2D platformers are there? Not many, and even fewer when "retro" style ones started showing up.

What are the PS1 equivalents? The FMV laden RPG? I can't see many genres created from that era needing that kind of treatment.

3D DS games (not to be confused with 3DS games) also had a PS1 aesthetic:

...but by this point, the stigma against 2D games had (mostly) subsided, so most DS developers smartly opted for 2D, as it looked significantly better.

Err... not really. Aside from the fact that the DS lacked texture filtering, it DOES have z-buffer and sub-pixel precision... a ton more polys, bigger textures, etc.

 

[MYE]

Playstation graphics always looked good and crisp in pictures. When everything started moving though, it turned into a pixel party with shit jumping around and textures warping all over the place

 

[Atomsky]

Talk about the lack of Z-buffering... This is why you hated PS1.

 

[entremet]

Err... I doubt it. 2D scrolling games benefit from the style because it recalls nostalgia when tackling an "outdated" game mechanic... but what game mechanics could be revisited that were exclusive to the PS1 era that aren't still done today?

I may not be phrasing it well... let's think about it like this.

How many big budget side scrolling shooter games or 2D platformers are there? Not many, and even fewer when "retro" style ones started showing up.

What are the PS1 equivalents? The FMV laden RPG? I can't see many genres created from that era needing that kind of treatment.


Err... not really. Aside from the fact that the DS lacked texture filtering, it DOES have z-buffer and sub-pixel precision... a ton more polys, bigger textures, etc.

The funny thing the 2D prerendered backgrounds that made games like the FF mainline games possible are also the issues with remaking them. If they go fully 3D with HD assets, it would be very costly as those 2D backgrounds were pretty detailed.

 

[KojiKnight]

Talk about the lack of Z-buffering... This is why you hated PS1.

As already mentioned, Texture filtering and lack of sub-pixel precision plays likely a larger role.

 

[MrBadger]

With a few exceptions, like Crash Warped, I think a lot of early 3D, especially PS1 games look pretty ugly. However the 2D games that appeared on PS1 looked really good, like the original Rayman.

 

[TalonJH]

I remember my dad and I saying how amazing everything looked. I thought MGS was mind blowing. I also remember my Dad and I praising Super Mario 3's graphics. Now it makes me laugh when people say people care too much about graphics these days because old games didn't look good. People always talked and cared about graphics. Nothing has really changed but how technical we've become when discussing them. It's sometimes funny to me when people complain about people comparing graphics but don't play indie games because they think they "look" like old games or aren't "AAA". Sorry off-topic rant over.

I do prefer a good sprite to an 3d model.

 

[Palette Swap]

TBH, I thought 3D games looked like eye tearing shit on Saturn, PS1 and N64 even back in the day.
I remember I got my first serious PC GPU when Half Life released and 3D PC games really blew all that away.

I guess that also explains why I tend to find a lot of full 3D DS games look absolutely vile. Metroid Prime Hunters is the stuff of nightmares for example.

 

[Yama]

So many titles then had great art styles though which in turn kept games beautiful in a sense. To be honest, that's why I retain such fond memories.

 

[SPACECADET]

it's hard to say, being where we are now and knowing how video games evolved since ps1.

i imagine i had no strong opinion either way, a game was a game. the graphics at that point for me were irrelevant.

 

[SonyToo!™]

Low resolutions and muddy textures let 3D console games down, as I love the low poly look of PC or some emulated PS1 games.

Sky Rogue really pulls off the look of early 3D arcade games and looks great.

Homeworld while made in 1999 uses a similar look, that's why the GFX still look good to this day.

 

[DryvBy]

I was an N64 person because of this. The moving geometry was just horrible.

 

[aeolist]

i think the main problem with early 3d was extremely low resolution and framerate issues out the ass

 

[TheExodu5]

So, what's the reason for textures and polygons shifting all over the place as the camera moved in PS1 games? Lack of some sort of filtering, I assume?

 

[monocle_wearing_hyrax]

I really like PS1 visuals i wish some indie games were developed with that style.

 

[indigo-cyclops]

Yea I have to say I'm really into PS1 visuals lately. I'm playing Vagrant Story on my Vita and my god, it's one of my favorite PS1 games, visually. I've never played, what do folks think of it?

Seems like a fantastic RPG with a cool battle system. But there is something really awesome about how it looks.

 

[jblank83]

-> High res emulator screenshots

Ok

during the 90s, PC gamers had this:

Good old Viewsonic. Had a 19" flat. Was doing 1080p long, long ago.

 

[Raptomex]

I can play certain games from that gen. Almost anything on the 64 but some early 3D games didn't age well at all. Quake, for example. I keep trying but I can't get into it.

 

[SkylineRKR]

I didn't hate it but it became awful after some years. When I loaded up Tekken 1 in 1995 I was blown away. Later on I found most 3D games to look like shit. Pre-rendered held up well, including FF. And 2D ofcourse, such as Valkyrie Profile.

N64 I absolutely couldn't stand. Keep in mind PAL users were fucked out of RGB scart and had lower framerate anyway. It was blurry and low fps.